Archive of Our Own ^beta

There’s people who are brave enough to ask. Stupid enough. Suicidal and looking for a way out through death by Johanna Mason, perhaps. She doesn’t give a shit whether it’s ballsy or self-sacrificial or just plain invasive and a show of an utter lack of decorum; the fact is that every now and then, someone wants to know how a little girl with crooked teeth who smiles in pictures becomes someone like Johanna.

And even though at least one of them has been a wish for a swift death, she doesn’t kill anyone who asks. But she does, swiftly and sharply, tell them to fuck off and if they don’t take the hint—she makes them. She’s good at throwing knives. She’s good at throwing axes. She’s good at throwing anything that’s vaguely knife-or-axe-shaped.

(And that’s more than you’d think, because Johanna’s optimistic with her definitions of knives and axes in the first place.)

Annie would say some poetic bullshit about it, such as how they all just carry burning wounds—and that she shouldn’t feel bad for the fact that she doesn’t want to talk about it, but she should maybe stop throwing things after Peeta when he’s just being curious and ruining the weird little meet-up thing they’d got going before she even managed to cook dinner.

(Johanna wanted to argue that it hadn’t been a tradition she’d agreed to. She’d been guilted into it by Finnick. Frankly, the only part of the fact that all the living Victors (and Effie) were invited to a semi-formal vacation in Four every six months that excited her was that she could play darts against Haymitch or that she could keep teaching Effie close-quarters knife-fighting, and she still travels for work, so she could do that without having to listen to Annie’s lectures about being less territorial.)

Maybe that’s why she finds herself, in the middle of the night when she’s sauntering out of the guest room that’s not really a guest room anymore, stuck between pissing and making some toast, and she notices that Peeta’s up, that she doesn’t just skulk off to piss. But instead, she audibly starts clattering around in the kitchen and asks him if he’d like some toast, or some tea, or whatever the fuck else you’re supposed to offer someone when they’re up in the middle of the night.

Maybe that’s why, when he doesn’t say anything, that she still makes two mugs and four slices of toast even though she knows that she’ll hurl after two, because they’ve only got the crappy butter that Effie’s churned (oh no) and left on the counter (oh no). She’s willing to risk gastrointestinal destruction, but only because she’s eaten so much half-expired canned food (because everyone knows that canned food can’t truly expire) that she’s pretty sure she’s got a decent immunity.

Maybe it’s out of pity for the fact that he got his brains fried and she had to listen to it, but she sits down next to him on the couch that they dragged over to the huge windows that overlook the sea, maybe it’s something else—maybe it’s that she feels bad for yelling at him when he’d stared at her incredulously as she’d gutted a turkey, pointed to her, the hard line of her arm slicing with a dull knife, then the blade itself, and asked how the fuck she could be the same kid in the photo Annie had hung up in the hallway.

Maybe it’s because had he been Haymitch, he’d have snarked something about that she usually slept with Finnick and Annie and she’d have to explain that she still kind of owned one of the guest rooms and that she’d gotten drunk in the yard with Effie when she’d been teaching her how to walk silently across creaky floorboards and they’d decided that they’d rather sit on futons and rant about everything they hated about the Capitol than they’d like to sleep.

And well, Johanna’s not the kind of monster who’s going to saunter up at three-oh-fuck in the morning and wake up a couple who’s barely survived The Two-Year-Old just so she can wiggle into her allotted spot on the side closest to the door. See, she can be non-territorial.

She jerks out the spare mug, places the stack of toast in the space she’s left between them, and after a beat of silence when he doesn’t do anything and she wants to scream that this is the most obvious, blatant peace offering she’s ever going to make so he might as well fucking take it or at least tell her to fuck off—he wraps his fingers around the messed-up ceramic, slowly, tentatively, takes it from her.

She makes a bad joke because she doesn’t know what else she’s supposed to do. “It’s not poisoned,” she quips, “I swear. If I wanted to kill you, I’d just do it by knife. Poison’s a hassle.”

She laughs at her own brilliance, but when he doesn’t, she awkwardly adds: “Of course, I wouldn’t kill you with a knife, either.” She tries to save it. “Katniss would kick my ass, and while I’m sure that I could take her, then I’d be dragging two bodies off to dispose of, and that’s the kind of crap that makes Annie look at me like I’m a weirdo—”

“You are,” Peeta interrupts, sounding constipated, “You are such a strange person, Johanna. I can’t figure out what your deal is.”

He keeps talking, not giving Johanna a breath or the time of day to defend herself. She’s not sure that she can be bothered to, because she doesn’t care what he thinks of her, she really doesn’t. He’s Katniss’ puppy, not hers. “You yell at me because I try to be your friend,” Peeta insists, even though that wasn’t the fucking issue, “And now you’re suddenly making me tea. What the fuck’s your deal?”

And Johanna fiddles with the cracked rim of her mug instead of answering that because she notices how Peeta’s stiffened, like he’s preparing for her to shout or throw something again—and she’s always wanted to terrify people, because if she terrifies them, no one’s going to get hurt, but now, she just sits. And she watches the silver shine of the moon stretch across the sea, and wonders how late she’s up, how long it’s been.

“The toast is buttered with the bad butter,” she says, in lieu of anything that actually matters, “I think we’ll both survive if we only eat two slices. Toast’s the kind of crap you eat in the middle of the night, if you ask me.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t poisoned,” Peeta bites back, and Johanna doesn’t manage to choke the startled laugh that barks its way out of her. She’s always had such an ugly laugh, according to every boy who’s ever held her life in his hands, minus two. Her father said she sounded like her mother, and Finnick said she sounded like a real person.

She’s always just thought she sounded nasally and out of place.

“You have a weird way of extending the olive branch,” Peeta continues, “You have a weird way of apologising, you know.”

Johanna huffs. “I didn’t say that this was an apology,” she counters, “I didn’t say that I was sorry about anything.”

“Sure.”

“Okay.”

Johanna nibbles at the toast, and it doesn’t taste as stale or sour as she’s expected it to—but her palate’s still accustomed to the absolute mush that she’d slogged her way through in Seven, so maybe she’s not the right person to make culinary observations.

She thinks about the fact that everyone kind of expected her and Peeta to get along better than they actually did—just because they’d both been tortured in the same hole. It was the kind of shallow determination that outsiders assumed was the reason she hadn’t eaten Annie alive yet. It was the only thing that made sense. So, of course, why wouldn’t the same be true with Peeta?

(Obviously, that’s because that assumption is incorrect. Her and Annie don’t live together because they were tortured together. Fuck, Annie wasn’t even properly tortured. There’s a reason for that, and it’s closer to why she and Annie get along.

But the real reason is just that Annie doesn’t tiptoe around Johanna, and Johanna doesn’t tiptoe around Annie. And she likes Johanna’s wry humour, and Johanna likes how Annie’s chickenshit until it’s about someone she loves and then she’ll tear out your throat with her teeth, Enobaria-style.)

She thinks about the fact that they absolutely don’t get along, even though she knows what he sounds like when he screams. And he knows that it takes a fucking lot to make her scream. He knows her dirty, ugly and deranged, and really, he shouldn’t be surprised that she doesn’t want to talk about the person that she was before.

He seems to catch her thought, somehow; reminding her a little of how Finnick seemed able to pluck the truth from the air, even when she wasn’t sure of something, she could always rely on Finnick to articulate it for her and then not tell a single soul about what he’d figured out about her. “I wouldn’t have asked you,” Peeta explains, “If that photo hadn’t been hanging on the wall. It kind of implies that you at least won’t get stabby if someone asks—”

“Annie was the one who hung it up there,” Johanna snaps, and she bites her lip, because she really hadn’t meant to, this time. The first time, yes. It’d been out of line, and he had to know that there were consequences for his actions. Everyone was talking about how important it was for them to respect Peeta’s fucking neurological recovery, and so, she was doing just that. She was teaching him the important lesson of fucking around and finding out. She was just doing what good friends did, obviously.

She’d thought, at the time, that he was just being an asshole and rubbing salt into her wounds because hey, that’s fun sometimes. But he hadn’t been, and it didn’t take a genius to see that. It hadn’t even taken a Johanna or a Finnick or a Plutarch or even a Katniss if she gains a little more wisdom; it hadn’t taken a slimy fuck who’s used to playing with people, is what she’s saying. It’d just been obvious, and it’d been obvious that Johanna had been an even bigger asshole than usual.

“Finnick told me what happened to your family,” Peeta offers, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

She doesn’t correct him and say that he used to know, that everyone knows and it’d been glaringly obvious and it’d been her thing. How Johanna Mason had been a rebellious little cunt who told Snow to go choke on a barbed dildo and it’d costed her. She’s sure he’s as tired of people correcting him as she is with people thinking that she’s not fine.

She doesn’t really give a shit to figure out what Finnick told him, either—one, because she, against her better judgement, truly does trust that Finnick wouldn’t say anything other than what Peeta could find around anyways, and because well, she doesn’t give a shit about what Peeta thinks of her. She doesn’t really give a shit if he thinks that she’s a bad person who got her family killed, because that’s not new. He wouldn’t be the first, and he’s not going to be the last.

Yet, she still tries to reassure him when she notices the tight line of his back in the pale moonlight. “It’s been a while, now. It’s not that fresh anymore and I—” I got my revenge on the old bastard? (She didn’t.) I survived? (She didn’t, not really. Not wholly.) I have a new family, not that it replaces the one I lost, but I’m not alone anymore? (No. For many reasons.) “—I’m still here.”

He doesn’t say something for a long while but he finally does reach for that toast.

“I admire you, just so you know,” Peeta says after a bite, “And not for the fact that you cut trees down like they’re paper, or that you could probably win in a fight against everyone and anything. You know, I admire you because you’re strong but not like that.”

He’s mincing his words, and she finds herself wondering whether it’s a side effect of the brain damage or if it’s a side effect of the fact that he’s talking to her. Because she’d studied him, when she thought that she might have to kill him—and while he was never the sharpest knife in the drawer when it came to manipulation, he was well-spoken.

He knew how to spin the crowd. He did that bullshit love story, and he did it well. He made up that shit about the baby. And he’d made those rich fucks in their stupid hats weep, because maybe it’d just sunk in for a sliver of a second.

Not that they were sending a seventeen-year-old to die, no, no. But the fact that there was an unborn clump of cells and seed inside of her that couldn’t feel terror or even pain and that her mother would have yanked out with a wire hanger, going into that arena. And it hadn’t even surprised her. The concept of life was always more valuable than life itself because it can’t talk back. The unborn are the easiest group to defend because they can’t ask anything of you.

They don’t need infrastructure; they don’t need human rights. They’re not going to cry as they bleed out on the forest floor. They don’t still need a steadying hand on their shoulders, even two years after the injury and miraculous return-to-life.

“I hate to feed your ego, Finnick says it’s terrible—”

And she does chuckle at that. How couldn’t she? She can imagine exactly how Finnick would say it.

“But I kind of look up to you even though you’re a raging psycho sometimes.”

And all her mirth bleeds away into a scoff as she sets her mug down against the glass coffee table that’d been one of the weirder guilt-gifts from Plutarch when they’d found Finnick rotting away in a cell, thirteen months after they’d pronounced him dead.

Johanna had another word for them, one that made Annie cackle but only when they were alone. Bribery. Shut-the-fuck-up-please-please-please-I-beg-of-you-tell-me-all-the-expensive-furniture-that-I-can-buy-you-if-you-just-don’t-say-anything gifts.

“You should pick someone better to look up to. Take it from me.”

Johanna had managed to wrangle Plutarch into the kind of stalemate that she was sure pissed him off greatly—the kind where she promised not to go around and cause the kind of trouble she’d just love to cause if she was bored and a little ticked off at someone’s utter and absolutely shameful degree of ineptitude, if she’d never have to plead for anything again. And now, Plutarch mails their household weird shit, because he took her very literally. Because he’s scared shitless of her, and she revels in it.

Finnick gets anything he needs paid for, and Johanna’s got a great pension that she cashes in every month and then leaves in a safety deposit box, because she’s still working and she’s going to work until her job takes her the fuck out, and Evan’s in a really, really good day-care and they’ve got a nice enough place, the four of them, to always end up hosting this stupid thing. Although, that’s mostly Johanna’s elbow grease instead of Plutarch’s coffers.  

And all Johanna’s had to give up is giving interviews about everyone she hates, and that just means she’s writing everything down so she remembers it when Plutarch’s dead and rotting, or for release after she’s taken herself out in her hubris against a tree or a particularly gnarly and undeveloped dirt road.

“Why should I?” Peeta questions, “I’m not going to stop thinking you’re a strong person, even if that’d make you feel better. Not a lot of people could survive what you did, and turn out…”

Johanna turns her head to meet his gaze, tilts her chin upwards as she shoots what’s halfway to a poor man’s imitation of a smile. “Functional?”

Peeta nods. “Just the word I was looking for. I’m not going to pretend to know what you do, but I know that you’re putting stuff back together.”

“I manage people,” Johanna explains, “I make sure that they get their work done on time.”

“And I’m sure you’re good at it,” he states, “You’re terrifying, and if you were telling me to speed up, I would. Did you have management experience before or this just a natural talent of yours?”

Johanna fiddles with a loose thread of the sweatpants that used to be Finnick’s, when he’d first moved back to Four, and weighed significantly less. He’s still underweight to the degree that it’s one of the things his army (and that’s not an exaggeration, Johanna didn’t know there could be that many specialities) of doctors constantly harks on about.

“Are you trying to make me talk about work so I’ll talk about myself?”

Peeta shrugs. “I’m trying to talk to you,” he answers, “Because I’m in your house—and don’t argue about that—” he beats her to it, not that she was going to, but, “—it’s just as much yours as it’s Annie’s, when you’ve renovated the whole damn thing, you’ve kind of staked your claim—”

“Who told you that?”

He grins. Wide and full and the kind of one that makes her happy that she didn’t shoot him. “Finnick and Annie.”

Johanna pushes herself up, and she can see that, against his best attempts, her rejection stings. Before she can stop herself, she offers: “I don’t want to talk about any of this sober, but if you want to talk about the past, we have whiskey and shot glasses. We’ll do a shot for each story, but I’ll start off doing six. And you’re talking, too.”

The first time she remembers being told she could do anything wasn’t very motivational and she should probably make up something else, if Plutarch ever gives her an offer she can’t refuse for that biopic. Worse, it ties into the first time she ever believed that she could do anything; and that’s different from just being told, because people are full of shit, and she’d known that, even as a girl. And that’s the perfect phrasing, really—because that first time was when she’d tried shitting outside.

They’d been scouting out a new site for logging, one of those artificial forests that the Capitol pricks had tried to make when they’d realised the cost of their horniness for mahogany but ended up looking stilted and wrong, and her father was crouching in the mud, testing something that she didn’t understand when she’d tugged at his sleeve from her spot right next to him, in that way kids do when they want something.

And he sighed at her, but his voice had been heavy with silent affection in that way that fathers do because they’ve never learned how to say it out loud, and he’d asked her, after a beat of silence, what she’d wanted. Johanna, six and a right lumberjack already, had pouted and started simply: “I need to shit.”

At the time, she hadn’t understood why her father had laughed so hard that he’d clutched his stomach, but now she does. It’s a little bit like when Evan pointed at the gar she was gutting and called it soupy. Kids just sometimes blurt out weird shit (no pun intended) and if you make the mistake getting attached to a kid, you’re going to find it cute instead of annoying.

But they were also deep in the woods, and further away than they usually roamed. He didn’t have the foggiest clue where they’d find a pit toilet, or if someone had even bothered to dig one. It’s not like at the base of the mountains, where they have those stupid electric blue plastic cubicles that they have to airlift out of Seven, because the prissy Capitol asses can’t squat and shit and instead, it’s so much more civilised to have flying plastic tubes of liquid shit that eventually get transported to shit trucks that are probably emptied in some poor District’s water supply, maybe even theirs.

So, he narrowed his eyes and asked her if she’d ever shit in the woods. Which, of course, she hadn’t. Because she’d only ever been in the woods with him. So, after a beat of silence, he asked her if she’d like to learn how to shit in the woods, because that meant that they could keep hiking. And maybe she knew what would happen to them, but Johanna was always a weird kid. She always wanted to be in the damn woods, even if they did nothing but walk.

Even if they did nothing but walk up and down the desolate rows of identical trees, that she’d learn at age twenty-eight didn’t even match the native ecosystem, because of course they didn’t. She’d have known that, years prior, if she’d stepped foot there again after her father’s death, but she hadn’t, and instead, she was standing there looking like a blubbering idiot who didn’t know what she was talking about in front of some man who didn’t respect her, and was talking about how this couldn’t possibly be worth conserving.

He didn’t get it, because of course, he didn’t. And she didn’t know how to explain that it was significant because she learned how to shit in the woods here, and that they’d ended up stumbling across a hot spring that she would think about for twenty years.

So, she just didn’t.

She’s not the little girl she used to be, and no one’s even around who remembers her as that.

Peeta’s not the first person to have questions on how the fuck you turn out like Johanna motherfucking Mason. And he’s not even the most disrespectful, with the way he phrases himself. But that’s because he’s Peeta, and whether he likes it or not, he’s a walking bleeding heart and in Seven—they’ve got an even better name for that. Walking victim. Future accident.

They’ve always prided themselves on being direct and it’s been one of the few things that she’s liked about her home other than the trees. She’s thought that their strict patriarchy is bullshit because it gives her shit for being the provider and liking it—and it makes her have to awkwardly lie about her and Finnick fucking, so they can get a hotel room together, because she doesn’t trust the world enough to leave him alone.

Fuck whether or not she trusts Finnick. She’d trust him with her life and then some. She’d trust him with her work, her reputation, her favourite axe that she keeps hidden under the floorboards in case there’s a sudden uptick in ransacking again, if the tentative peace really isn’t all that permanent or someone’s just ballsy and decides to break into the gated community. It’s the world that she’s got issues with, and no one can tell her that she’s being irrational because no one’s brave (foolish) enough to lie straight to her face.

She hears what they say about Finnick, and she’s broken a good couple of noses because she’s a leery bitch who just can’t help to overhear.

So, she gets why Peeta’s got questions about her and she gets why he’s got questions about the picture that’s hanging instead of being torn down.

Johanna likes using her body, even though she kept her physique real private as a girl—because she knew what men did to girls and that no jury would side with her for what she’d do to him in defence of her honour.

Johanna had been the one who got Annie’s shit together after Finnick died and it kind of ate her alive. Even though Finnick’s death didn’t stick, there were those months where it felt like everything was on fire—like one of those endless wildfires, raging through the forest, Johanna huddled in the stone basement tucked into her dad’s chest as he whispered that they would be fine, even if the world was swallowed in flames.

Johanna had been the one to drag Annie out of bed, Johanna had been the one hissing like Katniss’ mean cat that Johanna kind of liked anyways but refused to admit to liking, Johanna had been the one who’d packed up her things and showed up at Annie’s door in the middle of the night and insisted on staying. Johanna had punched someone who asked if her and Annie were fucking. She’d broken the bastard’s nose. She’d had to make a statement to the police, but she didn’t get properly arrested nor charged. She’d forced herself to sit on the beach with Annie, because the waves calmed her and Johanna was still angry that she’d failed that stupid test.

She hadn’t wanted to think about it. She hadn’t wanted to think about how Finnick would probably have lived if she’d been there, because she would simply have refused to let him die. If that meant that she had to take the fall, the shot, the bite, the blow, the anything—she would have.

It took Finnick dying for Johanna to admit that he was her best friend and home for her would always be wherever he was, even though she hated Four’s muggy heat and how everyone looked at her like she was a psycho when she split a log with no effort. She would have done anything to watch Finnick gloat about how he was a stronger swimmer than her, and she wouldn’t even force him to let her teach him how to climb a tree so she could laugh at him being bad at something for once.

She would just have sat there, with sand between her wiggling toes, under the erupting April sky and it would have been good. It would have been beautiful and good and right but Annie would still have had to get her shit together and be the one that cooked because Finnick and Johanna were abysmal at it.

But that wasn’t the truth. Johanna didn’t think that her story had a happy ending, but she didn’t walk into the waves—and she didn’t let Annie do it, either. It wasn’t out of some poetic “if I’ve survived this long, there must be something good for me and I’m willing to wait for it”. It was that Johanna refused to let anything have the satisfaction of killing her, even herself. And she forced Annie into the same mindset, because stubbornness is one of Johanna’s truest and greatest talents and Finnick used to make her promise that she’d take care of Annie if something happened to him.

She’d punch him on the arm and tell him that she’d never let anything happen to him, but look where that brought her.

So, she got her shit together. She got a job. She got better. She even went to therapy, because that was the condition of being able to work. She got a job that she kind of liked, no, loved, and she quit the drugs for it. She tried not to think about how the one person she’d wanted to tell about all of this hadn’t even been identified and was probably happily rotting in a mass grave like he wasn’t the greatest ache she’d ever known.

She tried to tell herself that she didn’t need Finnick to survive, tried to tell Annie that, too. Tried to make it real through action alone. She made a crib for the baby, went over names with Annie, held a makeshift memorial for Finnick, set herself up for the fact that she would have to remember him for longer than she ever knew him, tried to level the fact that she would have given him the stars and the trees and—

She kept moving on the same rules that’d carried her through the chasm of her past.

There’s always been some kind of burning inside her that’s kept her from falling apart when she should have crumpled into nothing but dust. But everything good comes with side effects, and she thinks that this came with the fact that her heart withered into nothing but a heavy lump in her chest that tasted a whole lot like the dust that Snow would have liked Johanna to stay as.

Johanna and Finnick were only one year apart. But Finnick had been fourteen when he “won”, and Johanna had somehow managed to make it to her last year, despite taking out tesserae every year since she qualified. Johanna doesn’t like thinking about that, but she finds herself stuck in the pattern, as she watches kids grow up around her. She lists out shit, lists out shit that she shouldn’t have done at the age she did, and she can’t help herself once she gets started.

When she was ten, she learned what industrial machinery could do to flesh. When she was eleven, she had to admit that sometimes, even when the bone knit itself together—there was something behind it that couldn’t be fixed by just leaving it alone. When she was eleven, she said that her father had sadness in his blood. Now, she’d probably call it trauma, even if the word feels disgusting against her tongue.

Burnout, maybe. It feels a little less like swallowing acid.

One of the things that’s always pissed her off about Seven is that it’s a patriarchal shithole, but it’s so fucking beautiful and it’s the only place that knows all of her, so she keeps finding herself crawling back on all fours, like a fucking dog. But she doesn’t regret that she’s carving out a life for herself in Four, because even though they’re going to give her strange looks when she asserts herself, no one’s got the balls to say to her face that she can’t do the work because she’s a woman.

And absolutely no one’s going to be more interested in what she can do on a mattress than what she can do with a sharp object.

When she was a little girl and desperate, she was willing to anything to work, because working meant that she’d live. Eventually, working meant that she didn’t have to take out more tesserae, which was basically the same thing.

When she was seventeen and a half, she gutted a boy she’d gone to school with before she started working.

She remembers him, because he’d been one of the only ones who didn’t look down on her because she was a girl who was more interested in climbing trees than talking about her wedding dress or future husband.

And now, he was dead at her feet and she’d never get to ask him whether he’d still wanted to work with software instead of lumber, because she was pulling the axe out of him, getting ready for round two against a girl with copper hair that she thought might have been from Eight, and might have been the kind of ally that fucked in the bushes because hey, who wants to die a virgin?

What she’s saying is that the Games don’t get all the credit for ruining her.

She was sour and mean long before Snow dragged her into his office by her hair and talked about how the same man who’d designed an arena to kill her thought she had a nice ass, and all that tree-climbing had to have done her some good, huh? Maybe if he’d phrased himself differently, Johanna’s story would have ended differently, too. But all she could think about was the fact that she hadn’t climbed a tree for fun for six fucking years and she wanted to carve that smug, smarmy grin into his face.

And how that really, really pissed her off—more than the fact that she’d had to kiss a boy before she could stab him in the back, or how she’d ripped another girl’s windpipe out with her teeth and all she’d heard was how that gimmick had already been claimed by someone else.

It hadn’t been a fucking gimmick, she’d wanted to say to her interviewer with the stupid hair that looked like a technicolour beehive, it’d been her or me. I hadn’t wanted to establish a distinctive fucking brand, I’d wanted not to get stabbed by a dagger coated in human shit, so if I got away, I’d still croak from infection.

When she was eighteen, she went home to streets that refused to claim her.

Sometimes, when it’s the middle of the night and she knows that Evan’s run Annie ragged and Finnick’s too drugged out of his mind to get up and wander around, she sits cross-legged on the floor and looks through her old photo albums. They’re a mix of what she’s been able to salvage throughout the years, and she keeps them underneath the floorboards alongside calorically dense canned ham.

There’s newspaper clippings from her time in the Capitol, there’s comments about how she killed in her Games, and there’s photos that her mother took with the camera worth six months of wages that they hid in a hollow spot of the wall, and that she’s never had the balls to go back for—because she doesn’t know what she’d do it it’s gone, and she sure fucking doesn’t know what she’d do if it was.

There’s a photo of the first time she’d cut her hair short with rusty kitchen scissors.

She looks at the little girl with the ruddy curls that she’d grow out of, and she looks at the gap-toothed smile cackling, covered in mud. She wonders if somewhere, deep down, that little girl knew that it would be inevitable. That she’d reached out with hungry hands, and to earn her stripes, she’d have to pay.

When she was eighteen, she sauntered back down the streets where she found her feet, and she realised that no one who’d watched her learn to run could look her in the eyes anymore. Like they were scared of her, like she’d become something they refused to claim. She tried to think of things to say, for the first couple of weeks, desperate to prove that she wasn’t tarnished, that she just needed someone to be willing to shine her up.

She tried to think of things to make conversation with. Like jokes and memories, but she realised why no one had invited her to parties. She was a real fucking bore, who could only talk about watching her father rotting in an armchair, and then coming back from the Capitol, her mind running a thousand miles an hour, because she’d finally get to go back to when life was a party to be thrown—when they could know each other without her being desperate.

And she’d found him there, with a bullet between the eyes, in that damn armchair, and his brains splattered across the wall opposite him. Posed. Posed in the exact way she never wanted to remember him. She’d known because of the blood pattern. It didn’t look like what it was supposed to, had he shot himself. And her father didn’t own a gun, nor would anyone admit to Johanna that they sold him one. And he didn’t even have the money for that, in the first place.

In the kitchen cupboard, Johanna would find a packet of recently-purchased sugar cookies, and a little letter saying how it was probably nothing compared to what she’d been fed in the Capitol—but that he hoped she still liked these as much as she did the last time they could afford them, at age ten.

When Johanna had been young and untarnished, she’d been known under a different name. Josie. And she’d been proudly hoisted onto hips, there’d been cooed about how pretty she was, how dainty. That was before she was malnourished, and long before she was mostly muscle and bruised noses.

She doesn’t respond to Josie, anymore. And that’d be her being cordial. Mostly, she’s known for punching people who call her Josie, now. And for not pulling those punches, for straight up fucking breaking noses. She didn’t even live in the same place anymore, but she’s sure that her father’s old friends talk about how the Hunger Games cracked her. And sure, they might have fucking done that.

But it wasn’t the Games, themselves. Even though she’d played small and scared, focused on her slim shoulders, made herself smaller; done absolutely nothing with an axe within view of the cameras, even against the advice of her mentors. They’d insisted and insisted, as she looked like a fucking tree, that she should prove that she in fact knew how to chop them. Seven doesn’t have the homey charm of Four, they’d insisted. Nor the underdog strengths of Eleven.

Do you want to fit in with the abject hopelessness of Twelve, Blight had asked her. Because not cutting trees when you’re from Seven is how you fit in with the abject hopelessness of Twelve. It’s your one strength. She’s sure he ate his words, when she cleaved her first skull clean open, bared nude for the world to see. She’s sure that he really, really ate his words when she did it again. And another. She’d killed every single of the final five, and a couple more.

She’d fucked up, actually. She thought there were less alive, but apparently there’d been some motherfuckers who hid in trees. Good thing that she’s a good climber, and that she doesn’t mind stabbing someone through the gut and twisting, jamming her arm all the way in, so she can feel the intestines wriggling before she pulls out—feel the gasp rattling through the body, as she watches the blood froth from the poor boy’s chin as she yanks her hand back.

No one would ever say that Johanna Mason wasn’t worthy of her win, that’s for sure. And no one’s ever going to see Josie, again. Not after that. She doesn’t blame them, but it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t sometimes sit by the window of her house in the mountains, where the air freezes in front of her nose, and think about it. It doesn’t mean that the war ends, and Johanna doesn’t think about the fact that she knows how it feels to kill, and that there’s people who have less sons and daughters because of her.

Finnick asked her, once—only once—if she’d meant to keep the pacifist play going. If something had forced her into attacking, something like a gnarly infected wound. She’s honest, with her answer, because it’s Finnick. Had it been someone who needed to trust her, had it even been someone like Peeta or Katniss’ little sister after she’d decided okay, maybe she should play nice—she might have lied.

But it was Finnick, and he’d drowned someone. Forcibly. At fourteen. It’d taken three and a half minutes. So, she says no. She says that she wanted to kill, and that it’s the truth. That she thought about it as soon as she stepped onto that damn train to the Capitol, how she was almost excited, because she was so, so fucking angry.

And because she didn’t want a single soul telling her that she didn’t deserve her win.

She didn’t want to be known as lucky because she’s never been lucky. She wasn’t lucky when her mother’s lungs failed. She wasn’t lucky when her father was maimed. She wasn’t lucky when she starved for seven fucking years. She wasn’t lucky when she was reaped. She’s not going to win by being lucky. She’s not going to win by sitting still and looking pretty, because she’s never known how to and it’s too late to learn when your life’s going to depend on it in a matter of days.

She doesn’t want another Victor to be soft-spoken around her because she’s just a lucky girl; she wants them to know that she deserves to be there. And that’s how Johanna Mason set a killing record. And Johanna Mason prided herself on that no one she attacked had to suffer through an infection. It was always quick, brutal, and relentless. But the most important word there is quick.

She’s not saying that she would have snapped and killed half a bus of schoolchildren, had she stayed in Seven. She wouldn’t have touched anyone. But she says this: if Snow thought that he could take her, he had a whole other fucking thing coming. She had a score to settle, and she knew that she’d even enjoy killing a couple of them—such as the Careers, who’d sniggered at her during training, especially the one who’d stabbed her with a dagger dipped in human shit.

And he’d nodded like he understood.

And they’d never spoken about it again.

Johanna had always liked Blight, even when she’d spat blood into his face right after winning. Even when she’d punched him in the face right before going into the Arena. She’d liked that he was honest with her, and she’d really liked him afterwards because he hadn’t tried to be her father. And she’ll have you know that being liked and not just tolerated by her is a real compliment.

He’d been the one to stumble upon her, still crumpled in front of that fucking armchair and he hadn’t wrapped his arms around her shaking shoulders and pulled her against his chest. Instead, he’d clicked his tongue so she wouldn’t startle and knife him in the throat and asked her if she wanted to bury the body before the Capitol forced her into cremation.

She’d called him an asshole but said yes and they’d dragged her father’s corpse deep into the woods, near a hot stream and a distinctive stump that would serve as the gravestone. Blight didn’t know him very well, even though they were close in age, but he said that he’d been a good man and Johanna didn’t refute him, so he kept talking to fill the silence as Johanna worked to fill the hole.

Not once did Blight ask her if she wanted help, once they’d dropped the body in.

He didn’t gloat about how he’d been right about her having to be nicer and not make enemies of the Capitol either, when they’d walked back. He’d sat with her on the back porch, as far away from her as possible, not trying to rest a hand on her shoulder and tell her how everything would be alright, how he’d be there for her.

“I want to set that fucking chair on fire,” she’d said, looking out at the dark maw of the woods that she knew better than herself.

“Alright,” he’d answered, “Do you have gas or do you want me to go get some?”

They’d watched the whole thing go up in flames and then he’d left her to her own devices. Years later, they’re drunk and waiting to die for the old bastard’s entertainment and the Girl On Fire, and he’s asking her what she wants to do with her life. She tips back her head, pours more whiskey down her ungrateful maw and snorts.

He’s not her friend, and he’s not her father. She’d never asked him to be, and he’d never tried to make her think that she wanted him to. “I’m serious,” he’d insisted, “I want to know what you’re going to do after all of this shit has hit the fan and dried.” (For some reason: those words stick. Even years later, she can close her eyes and hear him, sitting across from her, tilting his head like a cat who’s spotted a fat rat.)

“I think that I’m going to die and I hope that when you think of me, you can’t breathe.”

“Johanna, be serious.”

“I’m dead serious.”

“Asshole.”

“Takes one to know one.”

“Seriously, tell me.”

“I don’t know, man. I haven’t thought properly about it because I’d assumed I’d just seethe in the mountains until my heart exploded from the pressure.”

“Pfft, you’re a hoot, Jo. I think I’d like to see the ocean.”

“The ocean, really?”

“Yeah, sure. It’s the furthest thing away from Seven, y’know?”

“Sure do.”

“But you know what you don’t know? You don’t know that you’ve got to get thinking about what you want, because you’re going to survive to see the end of Haymitch and Plutarch and Mystical Thirteen and poor Katniss’ stupid plan.”

“You sound awfully and foolishly sure of that, old man.”

“Yep.” And she remembers how he popped the p, and how she’d thought he looked like such a little shit.

For some reason, people write history books and think that the war ended as soon as both Snow and Coin laid dead. That’s not the whole truth, or even half of it. And Johanna isn’t even trying to be a historian; she wouldn’t know where to begin with choosing what the future was supposed to care about. She’d probably just end up authoring an itemised list of grievances.

But she knows this: the war sure as shit didn’t end, and there were still violent bastards that thought her family deserved to die by the time that they brought Finnick back home to Four.

Specifically, they wanted to knock them out because they thought, by virtue of winning a death game they were forced to play, that they collaborated with Snow. It’s stupid, horrible shit—the kind that makes Johanna walk onto the beach late at night when she knows everyone that she’d care about hearing it is asleep and fucking scream.

Even worse for them and for the fact that Johanna is trying not to break more punching bags or axe handles, they thought Finnick was the worst of everyone—and if someone was dying, it should certainly be him. The crux of it is that they all met the business end of Johanna’s axe, but the problem is that she didn’t entirely hate it.

Annie had walked into the hallway, still muzzled with sleep, right as Johanna swiftly gutted the last one with the same kitchen knife that she’d used to slice up strips of chicken for Finnick the night previously. There were six more bodies scattered around, seeping onto the hardwood and assorted carpet that she mentioned how she’d absolutely replace, as she pretended that Annie wouldn’t be disgusted with her.

She was already imagining Annie trying to nicely evict the closeted homicidal maniac, and she already knew, that even if she stood with her heart beating in her hand and it would shatter her—she would leave without question. Because she didn’t have an explanation as to why her first reaction had been to silently and efficiently eliminate every single attacker, so silently that she didn’t wake a house full of case studies in PTSD.

She didn’t even have a good excuse. She just did it. She noticed them in the yard, and she heard them debating about which room Finnick slept in, and she heard them calling him a Capitol whore and she decided that they were going to die, right then and there—because, well. That fucking sucked and wasn’t a nice thing to call someone.

And because she remembered how Finnick had cried for hours after Peeta, still reeling from the cocktail of fear that Snow had shot him full of (really, that man died too quickly—and she’s aware that he was trampled to death, and how that’s really, really not quick even for an old bastard filled with poison), called him that exact same name when Finnick had just tried to visit him.

She could have ran outside and at least pretended to try and seek out help from the guards that patrol the streets anyways because graphic threats from semi-organised militias is just a thing that happens and is major reason as to why Johanna’s got a weapon in every room and a good dismembering axe under the couch that she’s claimed as hers.

She could have done a lot of shit other than wholesale slaughter but she didn’t, and Annie, gingerly stepping around a body that didn’t have a head attached to its shoulders, took a couple of measured breaths before she spoke. She ended up surprising Johanna, because she didn’t kick her out, and she didn’t even lecture her or break down crying. Instead, she just pointed at the corpses and said: “You deal with this.”

And Johanna had known she didn’t just mean burying the bodies or reporting them to someone or whatever the fuck you’re meant to do after killing multiple domestic terrorists in the methods where you silently dispatch them while your pseudo-kid sleeps above you.

Well, she’d also meant that.

She thinks about burning that chair with Blight when she’s dragging the corpses out to the boat, and she thinks about how she’d been terrified of the water and didn’t shower—but now she’s grabbing oars, and setting off, with stones and a carving knife and a boat full of bodies to dump. She wonders what Blight would say if he could see her now. She imagines his voice laughing that sometimes, you just have to tear.

Johanna’s never been good at making friends. Even when it’s been life or death. Sometimes, she lies awake and wonders if she could have given a couple of kids some better chances if she hadn’t been so damn abrasive. Despite his monumental failures in his own District, Haymitch had known how to convince people, when it came down to it. Pity it’d taken him twenty-five years to have a set that any fat bastard was willing to bet on.

She thinks, had he been mentoring for anyone other than Twelve, he could have been one of the most effective mentors of his generation. Of course, she never dares say this to Haymitch, because she’s not that huge of an asshole and anyways, that’s how you end up with a knife between the ribs and people going, “Yup, she kind of had it coming.” Which would be an ass way to go out, with everything that she’s survived.

(Even though she wouldn’t blame anyone, had she actually said that. And it’d probably have been Effie, in all honesty. Even if it’d been before the fall of the Capitol. She’s pretty sure that Effie’s buried bodies but she’s got no proof yet. She hopes that Plutarch’s historical research digs up a corpse with distinctive and damning body glitter marks.)

But back to the point: the issue is that even when she was a little girl, Johanna was better at cutting down trees than she was at making people care about her. Of course, eventually—this would land her in the Games. Because workplace injuries happen, and when you’re starving and everyone else around you is also starving, you’re not going to waste bread on a nasty girl.

Seven’s more patriarchal than Four. By a lot. Girls aren’t really allowed to be full people, and even now—she gets strange looks even though she’s responsible for most of the citizens finally having actual plumbing instead of a hole in the woods. She’d always been looked down on for being fierce, and for being more interested in how to properly conduct controlled preservation burns than boys. So, it didn’t surprise anyone when the anomaly was called up for slaughter on the reaper’s stage.

It shouldn’t have surprised them that she’d come back, either. She’d watched the interviews the Capitol had conducted with people they’d assigned as her childhood friends from the school that she’d quit at twelve to work full-time at the mills, and her father who couldn’t say anything about her other than that she didn’t deserve any of this.

“I hope you die peacefully in your sleep,” she’d said to Brutus as she stole one of Enobaria’s cigarettes and then snatched Brutus’ lighter for good measure, “Just kidding. I hope you die screaming my name.”

And it shouldn’t surprise anyone that she’s been banished to the side of the bar that’s mostly careers with weird teeth at the mandatory mentor socialising event that thankfully has a ton of liquor.

Brutus grins like he’s her friend. Which he isn’t. Not one bit. As she’s lighting her cigarette with her lighter, she looks over her shoulder at Blight, who’s gesturing wildly with his hands, utterly absorbed in regaling a swaying Haymitch and Finnick with some story that’s probably about rotting trees and how his mother had really gotten his vibe wrong when she’d named him after that.

She’s tolerating his existence because he’s a pathetic piece of shit and he’s going to tell her everything that she needs to know about how he’s training his Tributes, which won’t really matter for hers because it’s a lanky boy with a bum leg and a girl who doesn’t understand where she is but she’ll be able to recall what he’s said in the morning after she’s drunk him under the damn table, and she’ll be able to say it to Finnick and Haymitch.

And she’ll be able to talk shit with Blight about how Brutus, for all his showboating and the fact that he still brags about the children he killed, really, really doesn’t hold his whiskey well. And Blight won’t even need to drag her back to their quarters, like when she’d decided to see whether Finnick’s legendary tolerance was all talk.

And everyone will still be alive.

Here’s the fucked-up thing about the Hunger Games and mentoring specifically. Okay, there’s a lot of fucked-up tings. Here’s one of the worst things, then:

Johanna always told herself that she wouldn’t care—the odds are atrocious, even if they’re not the worst, and she’s always reminded of this, because for some fucking reason, Haymitch Abernathy tries to make her get drunk with him more than once every year, the odds always favour someone from the proper ones.

The Districts that are actually respected, and have access to proper nutrition, for one. The violent bunch of bastard little shits who have trained their entire lives to kill other children who had it worse than them. The further you are away from the career Districts, the further away your chances at winning slip away. Johanna won because she’s a brutal little bitch who’s spent her entire life doing what everyone says she can’t, and she was so fucking angry. And anger does a lot.

Most of them are scared.

And she doesn’t even blame them, but she’s not going to lie, either. She’s not going to lie and say that she was chickenshit, because she wasn’t. She’d been cunning, she’d already figured out what she wanted to do before they’d even shoved her into a stupid tree costume. She’d been a girl in the heat for years. She’d gotten good at it.

They might not have been good tributes. They might have all made terrible, terrible Victors, even if she could manage to get them sponsors.

But they were hers.

And that mattered.

And you wouldn’t get it unless you’d been there.

Johanna hadn’t spent a lot of time in a proper hospital until her twenties, and she’d decided long ago that she’d much rather take her chances with the weird semi-doctors in the shacks scattered around the mountains, with their cartoonish search and rescue dogs that are more concerned with escaping than they are with saving lives because no one’s made an organised system or method for training them so everyone’s kind of just winging it and therefore the quality is a fucking seesaw.

However, Johanna’s always been good at finding issues. So good that Blight insisted that he’d off her for being a nitpicky little bitch and Haymitch had agreed. So, she’s decided that she’s going to have to find someone who’s got more control here than she does, because she’s got grievances and they are as follows:

One, of course a hospital is depressing as fuck—especially the kind of place where Finnick ended up after being found half-dead in a hole—and they’re obviously aware of that, because they’ve tried to paint over the white with greens and yellows that look so washed-out that Johanna thinks the paint colours are on the same suicide watch as the patients.

Annie doesn’t find this joke charming when Johanna says it, but it doesn’t matter because Annie breaks down crying ten minutes in and is corralled out screaming and clawing. Johanna’s not mad at her for it—it’s a reasonable reaction and she kind of wanted to snap the neck of the nurse that’d hauled her out by jamming his massive fucking hands under her armpits and lifting and she didn’t just want to snap it, she wanted to snap it like a damn chicken bone—but she is mad at Annie for leaving her alone with the beeping heart monitor to drive her crazy. She’s mad at a lot of things, though, so it’s probably not fair to throw all her wrath at Annie either. Ugh.

She’d already messed around with the scratchy, thin sheets more than she could justify, practically wrapping Finnick like a corpse she intended to throw into the river.

She’s not someone like Effie who had to get a sharp and personal kick up the ass to be pissed off. Anger is the only emotion that Johanna’s ever been truly comfortable with, and she’d laughed when Finnick said that like it was some kind of gotcha. Nah, she’s known for years and she even considers it one of her strengths.

“Anger is the part of you that loves you the deepest,” she’d said as she’d laid down on her side next to him, winking a little as he’d pulled back the sheets and invited her underneath even if they weren’t going to fuck and all she was going to do was rest her head against his sweatshirt-clad-in-eighty-degrees-under-a-duvet chest and listen to his breaths ebb into sleep.

“It’s the part of you that’s pissed off because it knows that you deserve better,” she’d continued, obliging his silent request and making herself comfortable even though she knew she was going to boil alive, “It’s not complicated like doubt or guilt. It just says that some shit’s got to change.”

She’d been wrong.

Finnick found both comfort and terror through touch, so she brings his pale, bruised knuckles against her chapped lips and tries to remember how to prove that she wasn’t going to hurt him. She really, really wants to ask Effie for advice—mostly because ever since she decided that she’d like to make popcorn while she watches the Capitol burn, she’s been disturbingly good at walking the line between maternal and horrifying. Annie calls it a terrifying protective instinct, and Johanna would have to agree.

After Peeta had been in the Capitol for two months of semi-unsuccessful deprogramming, Haymitch had said fuck it, this is your own fault and called up Effie, who still had an axe to grind with Plutarch.

Effie had been staying in some looted apartment, and she’d been helping out with designing a media landscape that promoted unity and then moonlighting as Plutarch’s worst nightmare, because Johanna had just happened to walk by while The Great Yelling was happening in Plutarch’s office and Haymitch was standing precariously on the arm of a chair to see through the tiny window at the top of the door.

Johanna had wanted to ask Plutarch if they’d approved the budgets for rewilding and famine support in Seven yet so she could fuck back off into the mountains, but without saying a damn thing, she’d pulled another chair close and hopped onto it to witness Plutarch getting his ass handed to him by five-foot-something of pure, primal adoptive maternal rage topped with candy-cane hair.

“You’re a monster,” she’d said to Haymitch after he whispered that he’d summoned her.

“Yep,” he’d agreed and they’d gone back to silently appreciating the show.

She’s back in her body, hunched over the side of Finnick’s hospital bed with her head slammed against a bedrail that kind of fucking reeks of bleach and is sticky in a way that tells her that someone went ham on it with antiseptic and tears. At least it’s not the kind of antiseptic that tries to smell like literally anything else.

She’d bought one once that smelled of rank tequila when it was supposed to be lemons. Nasty crap. She’d still considered drinking it, when she’d been snowed in and ran out of brandy.

“Holy fucking shit,” she says for a lack of anything better or maybe because it was all finally sinking in, “Oh my God, you fucking cunt. You made me fucking mourn you. I was whittling you a goddamn tribute. Fuck you, fuck you, oh my God, I love you so much. Thank you.”

She got Katniss drunk for one night and one night only because Katniss had looked like a wet cat and Haymitch was busy banging Effie (go old man, get it) so Johanna had kind of awkwardly agreed to make sure that Katniss didn’t hang herself when Effie had asked, so Effie could go and get dicked down and then peg Haymitch. And because Johanna’s Johanna and she shouldn’t be allowed around vulnerable people but for some reason she is, she’d decided that they should get drunk without Haymitch making them feel weird about it.

Those had been her exact words, and Katniss had readily agreed which probably wasn’t the best sign but Johanna had whooped at before pulling out the whiskey she always packs in case of emergencies.

Johanna has spent most of her life profoundly lonely, which makes people uncomfortable when she brings it up, mostly because Finnick worked his ass off to befriend her and then to force her to befriend his friends. But those people don’t usually get what loneliness actually means. Even though Johanna’s no longer alone, even though she’s sleeping on Haymitch’s couch and when she’s trying to find a bodega that sells the chili chips she’s been craving since before the revolution, Haymitch calls her like five times just to make sure that she’s fine—she’s still lonely. She doesn’t have to be alone to be lonely. She wishes more people would understand this.

Loneliness doesn’t come from having no people around you. It comes from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you. Blight told her that, once. When she repeats the old mantra, she still does it in his voice. He’d said it because he was concerned about her. Not because she was making enemies, he didn’t ever give a shit about that. In fact, he’d drunkenly told her once that he wished he was a little more like her, and she’d been too stiff to ask him what the fuck he’d meant, so she was just stuck being fucking haunted.

She thinks its simpler than that:

It’s hard to speak and say things that cannot be said. It’s hard to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplainable, to talk about something that she only feels in her bones and not against her skin and that she thins can only be experienced in those heavy bones.

“I’m sorry about what happened to you,” Johanna says, handing Katniss another glass of straight whiskey. Katniss isn’t of legal drinking age yet, but she’s close enough that Johanna doesn’t really care. Neither of them are driving home, anyways. “And I don’t mean the basic shit like volunteering for your sister. That happened to, not the volunteering. Just the bog-standard reaping. What I mean is that it’s not fair that they turned you into a figurehead for their own gain. You’re like, a kid. It’s really fucked up that they didn’t have any better ideas than putting a war on the shoulders and conscience of a kid.”

She’s pretty sure she slurred most of that, and she’s not sure that Katniss picked up all of it from how she scrunched up her face as she sipped her drink, lapping at it like her freaky cat does. Johanna knows she’s not flinching from the bitterness. She’s seen Katniss neck shots. She knows that Katniss doesn’t flinch and sputter like Finnick does when he’s not performing, but she’s still not as soullessly lethal with putting back shots as Haymitch or Beetee (Johanna knows, you wouldn’t expect it but when she says that Beetee handles his alcohol like a damn champ, you see it) are. Which is good. That would be scary.

Katniss slowly nods.

“Thanks,” she says, “I guess?”

Johanna laughs. “Damn straight! You should be thanking me. I’m not nice to a lot of people.”

Katniss shoots her a look that Johanna struggles to read and for a brief moment, she cusses at herself for getting drunk.

Finnick spent the better part of six months in rebab—three in the Capitol and another three in an intensive program in Four that Johanna had threatened his way into because he really wasn’t doing well in the Capitol and Johanna was getting tired of staying on people’s couches or in horrible rentals. She was also getting tired of having to explain to Annie that it was fine if she couldn’t handle the Capitol right now, she had to focus on being pregnant and Johanna would stay by Finnick’s side to punch jerks.

Most of his days were the kind of strictly regimented that would have made Johanna want to kill somebody, but Finnick seemed to casually accept them. Maybe it’s because he was high off his ass most of the time; so high off his ass that he would ask Johanna stupid things like how she’d been doing and get sad when she didn’t give him a true answer.

Finnick would lie on his side clutching Johanna’s hand against his chest like she was his anchor or something and he’d ask her shit like: “But you were okay, right? When you thought I was dead. When the war ended. You were okay, right?” And it pissed her off, because where did he find that fucking audacity and how did he dare to look at her with those wide eyes, glimmering with unshed tears and put her on the spot like that?

The truth was that Johanna wasn’t okay. Johanna really, really wasn’t okay. And thinking about it makes her want to set shit on fire or punch through walls or drink whiskey as someone else walks out of her life—but that didn’t happen. People were stubborn and they stayed and it kind of forced Johanna to get it together and she’d silently hated herself for it because she was sure that Finnick would have wanted some kind of proof that he mattered. And she didn’t think that just living would have been what he wanted. And then he was suddenly in front of her, telling her that what he wanted from her was for her to live her life. And it made her think about what Blight had asked her.

“I missed you so much,” was what she’d ended up settling on, “But I got a job.” And Finnick had lit up, drugged ramblings and demands to hear more about her job following. So, she told him. She told him that she worked for the department of interior and that she improved the lives of her fellow Seveners. And she told him that one day, when everyone had plumbing and tetanus shots, she would become one of those tree nerds that he always feared she’d become. And he grinned so wide that she thought he’d got to be hurting himself, but he didn’t stop.

And Johanna kept sitting there, letting Finnick clutch her hand until he fell asleep.

If Snow’s goons had given her the option, she would have taken everything that they dished out against Peeta and Annie on her own body. She would have let them, too. She wouldn’t have fought. For once in her life, she wouldn’t have been a combative little bitch.

It terrifies her to admit this.

It terrifies her admit that she would have laid down all of her defences and well-tended weapons for two people, two people who she considered so much weaker than herself in the moment—but that wasn’t even why she would have done it. She wasn’t a bigger kid stepping in front of a scrawny motherfucker in the path of a bully; it wasn’t like that. She would have done it because their screams haunted her more than her own.

She would have done it not because Peeta and Annie had people who loved them and Johanna didn’t—she would have done it because she was one of the people who loved them, despite her best attempts and wishes. It was the truth, and she was eaten alive by it.

Sacrifices like that are stupid and get you killed.

But maybe that didn’t matter.

She spills all this shit to Peeta, confessions falling from her lips like she’s a swollen river and Peeta doesn’t say a damn thing—but that’s mostly because against her will and her best intentions, she doesn’t leave him any room to.

When she’s done, Peeta doesn’t say anything and just throws himself at her, hugging her so tightly that she gasps.

“You’re so cool,” he says against her hair and Johanna’s got half a mind to hiss at him to fuck off, but for some reason—she just doesn’t. After a minute or two, he lets go of his own accord and Johanna’s left feeling warmer than she has in a long time. Peeta sits back down across from her, looking at her like she’s someone she’s not.

Then, he asks:

“Did you ever think about Blight’s question?”

And Johanna asks:

“What the fuck?”

And Peeta elaborates:

“I mean, did you ever think about what you would say to him? How you’d answer?”

“Uh, no.”

“Okay, I’ll ask for him, then: what do you want after the war ends? It’s been a couple of years, so. Bark it out.”

“Bark it out? That’s shameless Seven slang, boy.”

“I know.”

“This is a fucked-up mind-game, bread-boy,” she teases, and she makes damn well sure to make it obvious that she’s just playing by grinning in a way that isn’t just baring her teeth, “I’ve been so nice to let you in on my tragic backstory, and you’ve just decided that you’re going to fuck with me forever, huh?”

Peeta shrugs. “If that’s what it takes for you to actually be honest about your emotions like a real person instead of a persona, yeah.”

Johanna laughs, waggling a finger at Peeta. A middle finger. Peeta sticks out his tongue in retaliation, sparing her no dignity if someone was to walk in and find her not immediately punching him in the face for his slights or more importantly, his insinuation that Johanna Mason is more than an icy bitch, even if it’s the uncomfortable truth.

So, she does something else that no one would expect. She tells him the truth.  

“I think I want my fucking ignorance back. I’ve always been a Northern shit-stirrer, but now I feel like an asshole and I feel like I have to remind myself not to bare my teeth in every smile.”

“I think I’d… this has nothing to do with anything but when he died I wanted to scream like I’d been the one who’d ran into the forcefield but I didn’t and I feel like I should—”

“Why?”

“Honour, I guess? Respect? An acknowledgement that he existed because he didn’t have a family and the only people mourning him are the same shop bastards who don’t maintain their equipment and laugh when little girls are desperate—”

“I think he had someone else.”

“I mean, you’re mourning him. And don’t try to deny it.”

Johanna stiffens.

And she thinks about how when she’d heard that Finnick died, she’d gone to sit in the bath for an hour with absolutely no water in it, staring at the tiles and wrapping her arms around her legs as she refused to sob because then she’d wail and she’s not sure she would know how to stop without setting another armchair or Plutarch on fire.

Peeta hands her a bottle of straight vodka that Johanna takes gratefully. Peeta flinches as she drinks it like water.

Finally, she says:

“My family used to call me Josie.”

“Is this you asking to be called Josie?”

“Nah. I’m looking for a new one.”

In the morning, Finnick’s waving his cane at her as she shovels eggs down her maw and tries to write off the sunglasses inside as anything but a hangover.

“Hey, Jo. Can you come help me fix the damn drain? You’re taller—”

“Coming!”

It’s not the same, but the echoes are there.