Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was fucking boiling this july.

Hanna stretched and rolled out of her sweaty sheets onto the hardwood floor of the shed she’d claimed when she was nine.

It was gonna be rough day.

She would absolutely kill for a fucking air-con unit. Do they even exist here? They have to. It's practically guaranteed that the capitol are all living it up in their perfectly temperate buildings whilst the poor sods down in 7 have to barricade the fences near the woods and around the residential areas in case of fucking forest fires.

She stretched out like a cat and set about getting ready for the day.

It was the year of her reaping. And shit she was the most prepared she had been for anything except her uni finals.

Hanna had studied and trained and climbed and sprinted since she realised where the fuck she was and what was happening.

When she remembered what year she was supposed to be reaped she started taking out extra tesserae and sharing it with the orphans down at the smokehouse.

She kept a small pen of chickens that she had raised from two stolen eggs one year. She was so lucky to get one of each gender.

Her main source of income was a small box that she’d put together out front, near the road. A box that said ‘pay what you can’ filled with eggs and feathers, old clothes that had been meded and cared for but no longer fit and small carved trinkets that people picked up for cheap, last-minute birthday gifts.

She spent the rest of her time working part time or hunting past the fence. She had to cut the hole herself, it wasn’t conveniently left by her ancestors like Katniss’. District seven was on the upper left hand of Panem, where the US used to connect with Canada. Now their external borders were the sea and ‘The Wilds’. It was literally just an overgrown forest with wild animals in it. Ironically, because they had such little contact with humans, the animals didn’t actually learn to run away from her on sight until it had been a few years and she had managed to get a fuck ton of practice in catching and hunting them.

She’d managed to secure part-time work chopping and pulling up stumps and planting new trees whenever it was too cold to hunt. 

The only reason the work was spotty was because every now and then the harvest crew would pull up all the sprouts and roots perfectly so they wouldn’t need to take on extra hands. She could absolutely survive off of the hunting and gathering and the box out front but the work was good for her muscles and it explained away some of the stuff that she knew.

Before she was here in the dystopian shithole born out of Snow’s cavernous arsehole she studied Ecology with a focus on biology. 

Her goal was to synthesise new habitats similar to the Eden project but much larger scale, perhaps she would have put a dome over an island or three to preserve the conditions of the arctic manually. Or maybe built giant fucking portable ice cube makers to dump into the ocean around the arctic to try and refreeze that shit. The world was fucked anyway so at least ensuring a self-sustaining ecosystem might’ve helped make up for some of the damage humans did after they all died out.

That was the dream anyway. 

But instead of snuggling with penguins she’s stuck here pulling twigs out of the earth because they aren’t frowning orderly enough or with enough space between them. 

But it put food on the singular shelf in her shed until she got her feet under her so she sucked it up and heaved.

—

She came into awareness at five years old. Her brain had deemed itself developed enough for the onslaught of memories. At least that was the running theory.

She learnt that first day that the people she was living with were sad. The whole community was just sad. A bone deep sadness that never quite grew enough to spark melancholy or hysteria but every single person around her was at the very least depressed. 

She tried to keep her head down and fit in, causing as little trouble for a mother and father she barely knew as possible. They made decent money and it showed in the meals they ate. (They always had food on the table at least twice a day. And when they had a little less, Mum had lunch at the Justice building. She always brought any leftovers home.)

Then came the accident. 

Mum had come home that day, from her shift up in the mayor's office filing paperwork, completely beside herself. She locked herself in her bedroom and didn’t leave it for three days.

Dad never came home.

Hanna found out why when she went to school the next morning. Teachers were apologising to her and children were staring and eventually, someone realised that she had no idea what was going on. 

She was pulled into the headmistresses office and they sat down and she explained the barebones but Hanna found out the story later from a rowdy group down by the pub.

Dad had a disagreement with a peacekeeper - supposedly about next week’s shift alignment. It wasn’t a big one and it didn’t come to blows. They were going to be lenient and shove it under the rug. But then dad’s coworker piped up and pushed him aside. 

Dad, not the peacekeeper. 

Dad stumbled back and tried to keep out of the way. The man had an axe and slammed it into the ground to lean on. It wasn’t meant to be a sign of aggression. 

It was taken as one.

The argument escalated. 

Shots were fired. 

Not all of them reached their target.

One of them hit dad.

He was killed on impact, it would be a closed casket funeral.

A few weeks later mum killed herself.

Hanna found her hanging in the garden. Wearing dad’s oversized sweats and strung up to the tree. Her tree. With her treehouse tucked right in the crook of the very same branch. 

Nobody ever called her JoJo after that.

—

Claudette Charrowsbright had the worst case of color blindness she had ever seen. It was the only way she could justify his outfit in her mind. 

His top was neon yellow and his trousers were orange. But they flared in a way that made him look like a Dorito. His shoulders were padded and pointed and his hips were so narrow that she was sure she could wrap her head around him and squeeze. It had to be surgically done. His legs stuck out the bottom like wires holding him up through sheer willpower. 

His shoes were purple and his socks were black and white stripes, he had silver hair. It sparkled.

She could not have imagined a worse outfit.

But at least it kept her entertained whilst he went through the treaty of treason and what an honour it is to be chosen for the games and how proud the district would be of the two lucky winners who get picked. 

She could almost ignore his fish eyes and the actual excitement in his expression at the thought of children slaughtering each other.

He was fucking disgusting.

“The female tribute for the seventy-first annual hunger games is…

Johanna Mason! 

Where is she? Oh! She’s right there!”

Shit. 

She knew it was coming but even still the whole world seemed to slow. The girls in the 16-17 pen all took their customary steps back and to the side to allow her to leave unobstructed. The boys were still petrified perfectly in place because the second she made it to the stage, their heads were on the block.

She saw a few mothers weeping in relief and a few of the younger orphans from the smokehouse were hiding their faces in their neighbours tops. Ollie was shaking where he stood.

She caught his eye when she was past and resolutely shook her head at him.

His eyes burned but he acknowledged her with a tight dip of his chin.

There would be no volunteers from seven.

There hadn’t been since the twenty-fourth games and they wouldn’t break that streak now. Not for her.

The four steps to the stage were gorgeous.

Intricately carved scenes from the games of the previous victors.

The top step was bare.

It wouldn’t be for long.

She took her place and stared forwards. Unremarkable, unseen, unchallenged. She watched the clock as it slowly ticked down towards the end of the reaping. She refused to let her eyes budge an inch. Tick tock. Tick tock.

Stay unremarkable, stay unseen and win unchallenged.

She didn’t know the male tribute. 

Thank fuck.

He seemed to know her though. Most people did, considering the number of people who leave things like mini sewing kits and odds and ends in her ‘pay what you can’ box. She’s had a few people stop her in the street to thank her. The Mayor put one outside of his house a few months ago as well. Apparently it was in honour of her mother. 

Her mother wasn’t worth honouring but she wouldn’t call him out on it.

The first time she was stopped by a peacekeeper was absolutely terrifying though. The guy was one of the few who weren’t imported from two, he was from three and she later found out that he was apparently called in to advise on issues with the steam turbines. They couldn’t justify the cost of him though so he was trained for a few months as a peacekeeper and will be here for a four year station. He was the one to tell her that the feathers would also be good for trade, the pillows in 7 weren’t awful but they were flat and cheap (filled with odd synthetic fibres that flattened instantly) and he apparently missed the nicer feather stuffed ones in 3.

Her fellow tribute was a weedy thing, probably worked in the paper factories. He was pale enough for it and his fingers were striped with hundreds of thin scars.

He’ll be dead in the bloodbath.

They shook hands when prompted and followed the peacekeepers into the Justice Building.

Blight stood straight backed and solemn whilst old Aggie practically held herself upright on his arm, the other male winners (there were two) just stood with their heads bowed, eyes averted. The last eight years he had been the sole mentor. Nobody begrudged him for it. The poor lady had seen every game since her own and only had one victor to show for it. She had had an emotional investment in every game since the fourteenth and it showed. She was in her eighties but she looked well over a hundred. The stress and the grief had aged her grotesquely. Hanna knew that the woman would not watch her games, nor any game after. By even Snow's standards she had done enough. Their second victor was the child of some of the surviving rebels from the dark days. He only lived for about a week after his games before he was executed by peacekeepers for a fabricated slight against the Capitol.

Ollie came to say goodbye.

As did Maple and Flora and Nick and Jack and every other orphan she had given tesserae to, as well as some of the kids who had started work and left the orphanage.

They promised to look after her chickens and not kill any until her games had ended or she had died. She couldn’t expect them to steal grain and forage as she had to keep them fed.

None of the kids were crying but she could see that they wanted to.

“I’m coming home” she promised “and when I do I’m gonna teach a few of you to survive the way I learnt and then you're going to be able to take out your own tesserae and not worry so much about the cost.” 

Ollie held up a fist and she bumped hers against it.

They left before the peacekeepers could pull them out.

—

The train had air conditioning!

And chocolate!

Hanna ignored everyone and ran straight for the sweet tray.

She hadn’t had sugar in so long.

She bundled herself up in the corner with a hot tea and a plate full of delicate little chocolates in the shape of plants.

She was furious.

She’d forgotten, mainly because the actors were all older and well fed, just how horrific the divide between the capitolites and the districts really was.

Claudette was a giant. 

He was larger than life at well over six feet with plump cheeks, fat fingers and a had a double chin regardless of his surgically altered waist.

She was well fed compared to the vast majority in her district, the only people that looked better of were the fucking peacekeepers. Though considering she was probably the only person who knew what a balanced diet even was, and the fact that she didn’t rely on using coin and beating crowds to buy food, instead hunting her own to ensure she always had something on the table. Although she had been prioritising protein since she spent all her time working out. She was towering over most of her peers at 5’6. She hoped that, with a proper diet, she could end up closer to 5’10 by the time she stopped growing. A further reach would be ideal for the 75th games. Longer legs too.

At least she knew how to swim.

“Alrighty then! Tributes, this is your mentor Blight, he’s here to show you the ropes, give you advice, a bit of training and to win over sponsors. I am Claudette Charrowsbright, call me Claude, for the remainder of my time as your host I’ll be your guide and coordinator, I’ll tell you where to go and who you’re meeting.”

Okay he’s a lot more professional than she thought he would be. He’s still disgusting but at least he’s useful.

She would still sell her soul for the wily, cunty goddess Effie Trinket though.

“Johanna darling! You are positively radiant! And your figure is stunning…”

It was a statement but it was phrased to lead off like a question.

“She’s Johanna.” The boy said. “Johanna’ well known for being able to care for ‘erself. Ma said she cuh charm ‘er way out a prison cell, right crafty bitch.”

She really should learn his name.

“Is that so? Well dare I say the interviews will be a breeze then!” 

They fucking well will not.

“And you! You’re quite tall for your age yourself, I do think you’ll both be properly in the running this year.” 

He’s not tall. He’s also fourteen. 

Talk for his age in seven means he’s about 5’2 and skinny as a rake. His hands and feet are huge though. If he’d been given proper nutrition he would’ve grown to be 6 foot at least. 

He’s not going to live long enough to reach that height.

Blight was staring at her. Claudette ignored it.

“Jo! Can I call you Jo? I-“ 

“I prefer Johanna. Or you could call me Mason.” No way in hell was this capital mutt going to act so familiar with her.

“Johanna then, I’ll show you to your bedroom first, it’s on the far side of the train next to Aggie’s old room. You both have two hours before dinner to get yourselves sorted, shower, get dressed and pick out new clothes before then. After we’ve all had food we’re going to sit down and look over the reaping in full, I've found the tributes tend to eat more that way.”

Johanna was led to her room. It wasn’t as modern as the books made it out to be, but then again, considering that Finnick, Johanna and Annie’s games were so popular that the quality of the trains likely changed after them. 

She was going to do Johanna’s strategy, but the two faced thing she did was absolutely genius. Unfortunately, Original Johanna™ was as short and waiflike as the rest of her district, and didn’t have as much visible muscle on her. She could convincingly play down her presence.

So Hanna had to be more strategic.

She found a bundle of products stuffed under the sink and pulled them all out, the tubs labelled ‘Hair-Be-Gone Goop’ and ‘Acne? What’s Acne’ was about to be her new best friends. She was going to have to make a splash.

—

They all stopped to look as Johanna entered the dining carriage. 

Blight had to physically refrain from rubbing his eyes.

She had found a dress that hit the floor in some sort of flouncy, green fabric. It had layers and movement and it draped off of her shoulders but covered her chest so she still looked like a kid. Her hair was untangled somehow and her tanned skin looked golden against the pale green. She looked genuinely good. Not just good for someone for the districts, she could have been pulled from District 1 and they market themselves on their looks. Most kids didn’t even know how to turn on the stupidly extravagant capitol showers but she had clearly been snooping through the shelves as well.

It cinched her waist but flared over her arms and legs enough that she looked almost harmless.

Except for the look in her eyes.

That sharpness was all danger, she looked just like her grandmother. 

Jessamine Mason was one of four daughters of the rebel leader of what was then the remnants of the ‘State of Montana and the Dakota's’. She was the only daughter to survive and she did so by hunkering down and marrying and evading notice and sneaking around when her sisters were killed and their children culled.

Jessamine Mason lost her eldest son to the twenty sixth hunger games. He won but they executed him publicly the day he returned to the district. Her second son got a job at sixteen, had a managerial position at seventeen and entrenched himself in the main export of the district. He made himself an asset so they wouldn't dispose of him.

His name was never reaped.

So of course Blight knew of Johanna Mason.

All of Seven knew of Johanna Mason. 

Her father died when she was eight and her mother followed shortly after and the kid was left to fend for herself. 

Everyone thought she’d be heading for the smokehouse the second the savings ran out but she didn’t. The mayor regrettably reclaimed the house (as all houses in the district’s are Panem property) but he did so a few weeks later than he realistically should have. By the time he arrived however, the whole place was empty. Johanna had taken everything she cared about, had sold or traded the rest down at the central hub, and had bought the indefinite use of a garden shed out the back of some merchant housing near the main square. 

The couple who let her have the thing were friends of the girl's mother and were touched enough that she even considered them an option that they didn’t complain when she set up a netted chicken coop around it. 

The next time the district talked about her was when she made the damned box. 

She’d been begging old wood scraps off of Bitchy-Bruce for weeks at that point, he’d cleared a small section of his station to leave them for her, and she had stuck ‘em together with twine and scraps of glue and a paste made of plants and water that kept the whole thing airtight. And after three weeks of slowly but surely piecing it together, she left it on the side of the road with a sign. ‘Pay What You Can’.

The first few people to use it were a poorer family who all worked at the factories. Their six year old son left a button and a small drawing in return for a box of four eggs. 

According to his father (who only spoke up about it months later) it was the first time the whole family had been able to eat a meal together without at least one empty plate in weeks.

The next day the eggs were restocked and the sign was unchanged.

And there were a few clothes in a pile.

They went after an hour. 

A single jar of milk left in its place

Half an hour later a second set of clothes had been put in and the milk taken out. 

A few months later it expanded.

There were bundles of feathers and double the number of eggs.

And an ugly little stump of wood shaped like a cactus. Or at least he thought it was a cactus. The games that year were desert themed. He traded it for far more coin than it was worth but he knew it paid off when he came back a month or so later. 

The box was bigger.

It had shelves now and a divider down the middle. All the wood looked evenly cut and measured properly for the project. It was still bound together in her weird homemade glue but it actually looked structurally sound.

There was a Tupperware container of a few odds and ends of fresh chicken, four cartons of eggs and the feather bundles were bigger, large folded leaves bound in string held fist sized portions of blackberries. The second side held three, clean, neatly folded outfits with little labels. ‘Children aged 3-5’ for one of the lowest shelves, presumably so it would be easier for younger children to reach. ‘Would fit a male aged 9-11 or female aged 10-12’ on the middle and finally ‘Adult medium’ on the top. 

Finally, underneath it all was a half-filled latched pot of tesserae grain. People had been leaving small handfuls of the stuff to pay for real food. And other people had been leaving trades in the old box for some extra tesserae.

Blight never really considered the district to be a community before but that scrappy little box built by a scrappy little girl had brought people together in a way that shouldn’t have been possible. Not in a Lower District.

They had the lowest number of tesserae pulls ever the second year after Johanna Mason's parents died. They also had the lowest death by starvation rate they’d had since the record-breaking harvest of 34 A.D.D. because everybody in the know began pitching in.

It only got bigger after that. 

That revolutionary little box became what was essentially a custom built crate with hinged doors and a full table spread next to it, a few carpenters carved and painted pictures into the crate as trade for a few things. People started sectioning off the table for their own trades. Berries in pots from the tailor’s garden, small bags of leftover flour or ends of bread from the baker, little bottles of milk and small fluffs of wool from a peacekeeper with a pet goat. 

He was worried about how it would affect the games. 

People used to stick tight to their families and a few friends in their circle so they wouldn’t be as devastated when the games came by. But now they were stopping each other on the street to ask after each other’s families and discuss the options for trade down at Johanna fucking Mason’s fucking box. 

It got out when Johanna was fourteen that she was and had been taking out five slips of tesserae every single year that she was eligible to. Nobody confronted her about it but they all tried to go slightly out of their way for her. They would give her old books or invite her in for a cup of tea, until they found out why.

Johanna Mason put her name into the fucking reaping five extra times each year because she was giving extra tesserae to the orphans. 

They all thought she’d gone spare. 

But then one of the smokehouse boys, Oleander he thought his name was, looked at one of the horrified, gossiping woodcutters and said “look at her, I mean really properly look at her.” So they did.

Johanna Mason was eating enough good food to have put on both height and muscle.

It was unthinkable but it was true. She was almost a head taller than most of the boys her age and wider than them too. 

“She forages,” Oleander had said, “she hunts in tha woods as well. She brings back meat, proper meat and eats at least two huge meals a day. The meat that isn’t labeled is usually stuff that she hunted tha' she can't explain if she were ta' label it and the berries she leaves in her box is usually from her hunting! She’s bloody wicked with a knife, she set a few good traps too. She said af'er she get's back from her games and has more time she’s gunna teach me!”.

And that was the other thing.

Johanna Mason had put on muscle and - apparently - learnt to use weaponry because she was convinced that she would be reaped for the 71st hunger games.

And here she was.

Everybody was ready for it. Even the people that thought she was mad or paranoid. The girls stepped away from her almost in synchronicity because they were all watching Johanna, they all knew that no matter what, Johanna Mason was going to enter the 71st games. She would either volunteer under public pressure or just be correct. It was a record breaking year yet again, but this time it was for how many of the older girls who were in their last year put in extra slips for tesserae.

Watching it from the stage was somehow worse. 

Everybody was looking at Johanna Mason, he’s certain that even the capital would pick it up on their screens. The only person looking at Claudette durig his speech was the girl herself because every other girl was staring at her with tears in their eyes. He had never seen anybody at a reaping less scared than the girls of this year. Not a single one of them tried to hide behind another. Not a single one fussed when their finger was pricked, some (the oldest of ‘em) looked downright giddy. Not a single girl was tense when Claudette’s hand went into the bowl. The only thing he did see was a huge swell of relief when her name was actually called out. They hadn’t broken their streak. And they still felt safe. And Johanna didn’t even seem to notice the thankful hands that glided across her arms and her back as she walked through the crowd. She didn’t seem to notice when the parents of the girls all bowed their heads. And she didn’t so much as twitch when she stood before them on that stage and every single person in the crowd put their hand over their heart and their head down in thanks.

Regardless of the outcome, not a single member of the district will starve this year. 

All because of a scrappy little orphan in her scrappy little shed with her scrappy little box.

He was far too emotionally invested in this year’s game.

It was gonna kill him.

He really wanted Johanna Mason to come home.

Chapter Text

They watched the reaping through twice, the first time so Johanna could list their names and ages down on the top of each page in the notebook she requested and the second time so she could pause and zoom in to write notes. 

The careers looked as commandeering and dangerous as they always did, they were all stocky and muscular, even the girls. The kids from three were both thin academics who had likely never run for anything outside of mandated PE at their school.

The pair from four were little merfolk from tales of ancient greece. All lithe muscle and deceptive speed. She was genuinely worried about facing them. At least she was sure she could outrun the careers.

The kids from five were either dead in the bloodbath, or shortly after. Same for the kids in six. 

The girl from eight looked like a stiff breeze would knock her flat and she cried the whole time, but the boy was huge. He went down on the list with a star next to his name. So did both of the Elevens. District nine was always somehow the second worst fed district, and this year was no different. She could see the bones of both tributes through their skin. It’s almost like the district providing most of the food was the same district whose food was most closely monitored… Note the sarcasm.

District 10 was usually another one to look out for if their tributes worked as butchers or farm hands but the girl looked too well fed and her hands weren’t calloused enough for it (probably a merchant) and the boy was too young to work. Thank fuck. 

Twelve was no different from usual. The colloquially known example district. Coal wasn’t in as high demand as it was at the end of the Dark Days and the Capitol had never shifted or expanded the focus of the district so they were left in squalor with little food, terrible food and coal dust lining their lungs.

Haymitch didn’t fall off the stage at least. 

If that could be considered a plus. 

Sleeping on the train was weird. She hadn’t actually been inside any kind of vehicle in this life. She might’ve if she was one of the choppers on the further fields, they got to ride the transport to and from the stands nearer to the other districts. 

All that together meant that long story short, she couldn’t sleep.

So she didn’t.

She ran knife drills pirated from the little she remembered from fucking John Wick using tableware, she made a target out of a sofa cushion that she pinned to the wall using forks in each corner and practised throwing hard enough for it to still at least leave an indent in the wall through the padding. She did her calisthenics, a surprisingly accessible form of exercise when the main resource available is your own body, until her legs shook underneath her and she ran through all the plants she knew from her district and ones she spied in previous games, and exactly what properties they had. 

She woke up the next morning to find an avox prodding her with a broom handle like a rabid animal.

She glanced blearily around the room.

Okay so maybe the disassembled sofa, the upturned table leaning on its side against the wall and the piles of general stuff were not the most confidence inspiring. The broom handle was probably a necessary precaution.

She thanked the avox under her breath and hobbled towards her room to run a steamy bath. 

She was going to try the products she couldn’t be bothered with the day before.

—

Fucking hell whoever chose her wardrobe knew what the fuck they were doing. 

She was wearing high waisted, slightly flared brown trousers with a matching belt with gold hardware and a white, puff-sleeve blouse that closed snug to her waist and wrists. Once again she looked less muscular than she normally did, though more serious today than last night.

She needed to speak to her fucking stylist. She would not go out there dressed like a tree. It was fine for Original Johanna™ because she wanted to look tiny and weak and unsponserable. But sponsors were life or death and she would not give up access to medicine for a strategy that her healthier diet and greater height would not even let her use to the fullest extent.

She was the second person in the dining hall. 

The first was Claudette Charrowsbright. 

He was clad in nothing but a velvet blue dressing gown.

She forcibly turned her mind back to the topic.

“Do you have a phone and the contact details for my stylist?”

He straightens, suddenly all business but the gleam in his eye was telling of his amusement.

“I do Indeed my dear, would you like them both?”

She nodded and set up her breakfast. She ignored the greasy food along with the too-light options and settled for two of what looked like a veggie omelet and some over sweetened tea. 

A phone was slid over to her a few minutes later, a contact already open on the screen.

“Hit the green button to call, Doll. I've texted ahead so Ro knows to expect you.”

She did so immediately. She didn’t have time to hesitate, they would pull into the capital in a few hours and the team would need all the time they could get.

“Hello Johanna! This is Sparrow, your lead stylist, but call me Ro, everybody does!” The phrase was quick and rehearsed. She wondered if he had sat in front of the phone to practise. 

“Hey, I have an idea but it’ll probably be you against the clock. How invested are you in fucking over every other stylist in the business.”

“...Honey you are speaking my language,” there was a noise like she had pulled the phone away from her ear and her voice could be heard as a muffled shout. “Tish! Tish get me my notepad!” the sound became clear again. “Sorry about that Honey, what was your idea?”

“You can use an old costume as a base but preferably one with a mermaid skirt or one that at least hits the floor, I need my legs and arms covered. Now would it be possible to-”

—

“This year’s colour of the year is silver?” a pause, “Well we’re not fucking doing that.”

Johanna Mason had been on the phone since before he entered the dining cart, and it had been half an hour since he arrived. She and the stylists were still talking.

“Uh huh, no that could work but do you have a longer skirt maybe with ruffles or layers, just a flouncy skirt? Yeah? Bril, cut that shit up and stitch it to the bottom, when I say train I mean I want the people in the first seats to still see it halfway through the parade.”

The voice on the other end started off as the recognisable cheery tones of district seven's stylist of almost forty-five years but had been passed around a few times so now she was talking to either a woman or a particularly young man about decorating the charot itself. 

“Mmhm, okay what have you got so far? No that's evergreen, it doesn't make sense. Yeah! Perfect, so more options like that then.”

In his time as a mentor, Blight couldn’t remember that actually having been done before. It would certainly be interesting if it worked out. It would possibly set a new trend or tradition for the games. No wonder they’d been on a call so long.

They were pulling into the capitol in an hour or so but the conversation kept up like she had only just picked up the phone. 

He peeked over at the napkin that she’d been doodling on for the last hour. 

She had just drawn a bunch of different leaves. 

That told him absolutely nothing.

Wasn’t he the one whose job it was to think up a strategy?

He squinted over at the girl on the phone.

She was sitting with a leg thrown over an armrest, twirling a lock of hair with a pencil with what looked like Claude’s sparkly purple phone pressed to her other ear with her other hand. Jessamine shone through the hard jutting of her chin and the slope of her creased brow.

She’ll probably do a better job than him. 

He leaned back and prepared for the barrage of questions the boy would probably have once he finished stuffing his face with bacon.

—

The train car went dark. 

There were still a few lights inside, but outside it was as if night had fallen again. 

They were in the tunnel. 

That meant they were nearly at the capitol.

Hanna finished up her call with promises to double check some of the details whilst her prep team were working on her to not slow any efficiency and then rose to sit by the window. 

The train slowed, the tunnel started lightening and then she was almost blinded by the beam of light as they left the tunnel.

It was the land of Oz on steroids and in rainbow colours. The cameras hadn’t lied about its grandeur. If anything, they had not quite captured the magnificence of the glistening buildings in a rainbow of hues that tower into the air, the shiny cars that rolled down the wide paved clean streets, the oddly dressed people with bizarre hair and painted faces who had never missed a meal. 

All the colors seemed artificial, the pinks too deep, the greens too bright, the yellows painful to the eyes. That was probably why Claudette’s outfits were so godawful, his retina’s had probably burnt away with all the visual input from the colours he had been surrounded with.

Shit, compared to some of the people she could see out of the window, his outfits were bordering on tame.

She didn’t smile and she didn’t wave, but she also didn’t frown. She sat there like a doll oohing and ahhing at the scenery, hoping they would think her reluctance to look at them would not be noted under her amazement by their daily lives. 

They started slowing to a stop. 

“Right, we are going to make a short walk to the remake center, we are entering in order district one through twelve so you’ll have to sit tight for a little while!” Claude held a hand up before the boy could interrupt him. “The way there is very clear, it's been sectioned off with fences. However this means that a crowd of superfans are going to be standing on either side waiting to greet you both so it’s time for game-faces people! We’ve got a popularity contest to win!” He seemed genuinely excited about it as well. Which somehow made her nervous.

“Now the remake center is going to take a bit of time, Johanna I know you’ve had a bit of a headstart with the style team but the actual prep work is going to be the killer here on the schedule.” He paused, inhaling a lungful of air before continuing. “The chariots will start a half hour after sundown which means that you will be in the center from now until you are taken to the waiting area, a bit of the time will be spent just standing on a platform and being fitted so you can use that time to think about how you want to present yourself, what story are you going to sell? How are you going to respond to your audience? This is a show darlings, it’s time to rehearse your roles.”

—

He really didn’t undersell the whole ‘superfan’ situation. 

People were trying to grab her arms, yank her hair, pull on her sleeves. At one point somebody lowered their toddler over the fence and she grabbed him up and handed him back before a peacekeeper - who was guiding them - could trip over the poor thing whilst he was looking the wrong way. 

In these sorts of situations - where peripheral vision is more necessary than optional - she really didn’t get the point of the visors.

The boy was safely returned to a banshee-like lady with oil spill hair, skin and makeup. She didn’t mean that as in colour chrome powders painted on in various colours, the lady actually just looked like she had been drowned in oil. The sun reflected off of her skin like it would’ve a puddle. It was super unnerving to look at. At least the poor boy had been spared, he was just dressed like King Edward VI.

Short walk her arse, it was a solid fifteen minutes of speed-walking through a bendy path lined with rabid chihuahua-people who all wanted to either eat, fuck, sell or maul her.

Why was this part cut out of the books? No wonder Katniss was in such a pissy mood the whole time, she was already one foot in the grave but then they had to pile on the shit with all the fucking capitolites. 

Hanna’s prep team were clearly expecting her. All of them looked slightly worse for wear as they dragged her down a corridor, up a flight of stairs, down another corridor and into a room. There was a pile of heeled shoes in one corner. She looked down. All of them were barefoot or in trainers. Her lip twitched. 

At least they all looked excited. A few of the other stylists in the crowd in the lobby just looked bored. Perfectly put together but terribly bored.

“Okay so we have all of the leaves designed and being sent to the laser cutter to get produced. The dress is being dyed and stitched as we speak, so it’s just prep, the carriage and makeup to worry about. We sorted the mechanism for the carriage and dress, Ro had to pull a favour with Beetee if you can believe it, so all we have to do is pray it works exactly as intended!”

“And you found dye that can-” Hanna was cut off instantly.

“Yup! They didn’t even have it as a reference in fashion school for some reason, though I suppose that’ll change after this year. It went out of style around year twenty eight or thereabouts and it wasn’t a big enough movement for it to be made a note of during the course I took, though my focus was on fashion development and predicting trends and not fashion history.”

She nodded along even though she had no bloody clue what the girl was yapping about, she was talking a mile a minute. 

One of the lads held up a robe as the girl quickly, clinically and efficiently helped her undress. She was so grateful for it.

Shit, she might actually like this lot.

She sat on the table and was about to lay flat when the door burst open again.

Four people bustled in in a flurry of colour and noise.

“Johanna! I’m Ro, lovely to see you in person, now what do you think of these.”

He thrust a handful of sparkly gemstones into her line of sight.

She looked up at him,

“We are about to become the best of friends.”

They both grinned matching Cheshire smiles.

Chapter Text

She had to be lifted into the chariot.

Her team fluttered around and flapped their hands in all directions whilst they lectured the baffled peacekeeper about where to put their hands and how much pressure to use. The poor sods hands had started shaking against her waist. 

She bit her lips together so she wouldn’t laugh.

She could feel the stares of the other tributes as the took in her massive fucking ballgown. 

The train of the thing was carefully folded and held by the two girls on team Ro, Prunella an older lady with rectangular frog pupils who she had only shared about four words with and Letitia or Tish, the bubbly girl who had glomped her at the start. 

Ro was ensuring everything was wired up and ready to go before she could be hoisted into position but her District partner was already strapped in and a wire was poking out from his ankle and plugged into the chariot’s grid.

A quick sweep of the rest of the tributes saw many, many style teams practically frothing with rage at the matching chariot and the whole ensemble. The career tributes and their mentors didn’t look much better.

She took another quick glance. 

Finnick Odair wasn’t frothing so much as analysing. Maybe he was trying to figure out what the mish-mash of circuitry actually did. She honestly wasn’t a hundred percent sure herself. Mags (who had probably subbed in for Annie considering her mental state) gave her a once over, a twice over (her eyes lingered on Hanna’s face but she elected to put that in the ‘later’ category) and a thumbs up. Damn, old ladies shouldn’t be that cute. 

They still had about twenty minutes before go-time and nobody spoke above a mumble. She had to be careful not to look around too quickly or her giant laurel headpiece was liable to fall off.

The opening music began. It was easy to hear, blasted around the Capitol. Massive doors slid open, revealing the crowd-lined streets. The ride should last about twenty minutes and end at the City Circle, where they will welcome the tributes, play the anthem, and escort them into the Training Center, which will be their home/prison until the Games begin.

They’ve gotten incredible at moving the cattle around whilst advertising it. Efficiency was the name of the game. 

District one went out first, this year’s theme seemed to be silver jewelry. It was literally all they were wearing. A few chains draped low enough to cover nipples and private parts but based on how stiff they were standing, they probably weren’t glued down.

District two were in glammed-up peacekeeper armour with crowns made of the visor mirrors instead of helmets. They were also dusted with silver. No wonder Sparrow was harping on about a few of her colour choices, silver seemed to be all anyone was wearing. She squinted around and found Claudette shuffling out of the room towards the stands, his hair was also silver.

District three, were on the same sort of theme, silver wires and circuits that fanned out like an exaggerated tailcoat and a crinoline respectively. That costume was actually kind of cool. It would be even cooler if the wires moved or lit up or something. But it was a very cool concept.

District four were trying to emulate Finnick with minimal success, it was silver fishing nets over blue painted skin that hid nothing.

District five were dressed like disco balls. Another decent decision if it weren't for how odd the shape of the clothes was. It still fit the silver theme but allowed for more colour and attention in reflecting the colors of the lights or the audience.

District six were dressed like silver cuboids. Holy shit, were they traffic lights?

Their designer swung by to push a button on the underside of their boxes.

Yup.

They were giant traffic lights.

And then they were moving. Sparrow sprinted over to put a remote in her hand. She looked exhausted but smug.

Hanna waited until they had left the tunnel and had gotten a few smiles and waves in before she pressed the button.

—

“-nd there comes District Ten, the silver trend continues unlike seven who-” Caesar Flickerman stood and leant over his desk, “What is happening with Seven?”

Oh shit, it was happening. 

Blight’s eyes found his tributes immediately. They were both clad in a dress and a robe - with exceptionally long trains and the chariot timings had to be altered slightly to compensate - made entirely of leaves, but - as he was now noticing - they had started falling off, leaving a trail of fabric scraps behind them. The robe was all but gone, and the dress wasn’t far behind. They were clad in skintight, bright gold and crystalline applique of vines and twigs and forest creatures that draped off their forms like a king’s robes. Both of their collars were bare aside from a gold and diamond collar that dug into their skin and imitated blood falling from the indents as gold ichor. It was form fitting without being tacky. The last of the leaves fell from the dress and the dress that was left still trailed behind the carriage but instead of the leaves, it started shedding a small trail of gold glitter.

He did another scan of the lineup before his gaze snapped back. 

The carriage was also fucking gold.

When did the leaves fall off the actual carriage? 

“What a spectacular idea! Showing the soul and the life under the leaves and incorporating the carriage and the trail behind them. I dare say the leaves will sell well as collectors items. Incredible work from Stylist Team Seven led by Sparrow Westwards! Surely n-”

He tuned out the rest of the yapping.

He could work with this. Mason hadn’t left her partner to flounder either, which was to be expected given the girl's character, but she clearly expected him to work for his own sponsors and he was rising to the opportunity. Smiling and waving and charming the pants off a few of the girls in the front row, letting his robe fall a bit lower down his tanned back than it had been intended. Unfortunately, Johanna Mason and her efforts towards the actual event were going to steal the show when the information of her involvement was leaked if it hadn’t been already.

He wished for the first time in years that he could have been in Seven watching this with the people of his district.

They made it to the circle and all the lights dimmed. Except he could still see his tributes clearly. 

The carriage and their fucking clothes were emitting a soft gold light that was bright enough for the cameras to pick out more of the details than they did with full parade lighting. The fabric was glowing. 

Snow began his speech but a few of the smaller screens dotted around still showed District seven’s carriage, hovering over the details, and then they switched over to the traffic lights for a few seconds for contrast. Sparrow outdid herself. But then again it isn’t hard to outdo forty years of tree costumes.

The precedent is that the screen will usually flicker to each of the chariots at some point during the speech, and the main screens did but the smaller one was still running up and down the length of the costume finding more and more details each time, until it rests back on their faces. 

Johanna Mason and Burleigh Nairn were crying tears made of what looked to be molten gold.

—

She ignored everybody faffing and fluttering around her as she watched the doors to the Tribute Center close. 

She won’t see them open again if she fucks this up.

She won’t fuck this up.

They eventually made it to the lift and she’s bundled in with three people holding her dress and her tribute partner holding her shoes. She pushed the button for seven. The whole lift took a collective breath of relief.

“Holy shit!” Sparrow looked faint, “I think you just made my fucking career Johanna.”

And, yeah. She could see that this was an important moment for her. The whole parade stylist thing seemed like a dead-end job to her when she was watching the movie. But it was very clearly more of the dead part in real life, it had the most mixed turnover rate she’d ever seen. Stylists either had two or three super notable designs, mainly in the districts with smaller numbers or were around for decades. They're put into a position of constant criticism, there is nowhere to be promoted so the only thing you can do is make a big enough showing to be able to receive commissions throughout the year. From there she supposed the only options were to quit and go solo, starting up a new fashion house or failing to reel in enough interest between or during parades just staying stagnant with the same old prompt and the same theme and the same deadline. No wonder he had stuck to trees for forty years. His bare minimum was still miles better than 12’s coal miners outfits or 5’s power theme. There’s only so many ways to beat a dead horse.

“Do you have any ideas for your interview outfit? I’ll have a lot more wiggle room in terms of time to sort that one out so it won't be five dresses chopped and puzzled together. I was thinking about using the roots of the tree as a metaphor or a foundation for your dress but i’m sure-”

She let her prattle on as they rose seven floors into the sky.

“-ll me later with suggestions or designs, I’ll see if I can have my sketchpad sent up to you tomorrow or the day after. As a matter of fact, I'll go ask now.”

She barely registered the designer trotting off to bother an avox as her prep team were bundling her back into the elevator.

The avoxes were impossible to ignore in their suite. There was one in every room - or rather every section of room given the open-plan design - and she felt sick at the sight.

Avox: Latin for voiceless.

She scanned the three in her immediate line of sight. 

Were they capitol born? Were they district? Were they political enemies of Snow? Did they chafe against his system? Did they lose children to the games? Siblings? Is their punishment truly the dehumanising service or are they serving the tributes specifically? Did Johanna resemble a family member of theirs? Were they doomed to watch tens of tributes - children - be sent off to die for a reason or were they just unlucky to be stationed here?

She turned away and went looking for her bedroom on her own. 

One of the female avoxes nudged her head towards one of the corridors. 

Hanna stomped into the only room in the corridor without acknowledging her. 

The room was the size of her old home. Before her father passed in the tree stripping accident. Before the shed.

There was a desk with some thick paper and a full set of over a hundred coloured pencils. 

The pages were labelled in loopy cursive: Interview pre-arena, Interview post-arena, Victor's banquet and Capitol stop - victory tour.

At the very least, Sparrow could use the designs she creates after her games to give to the next tribute if she doesn’t make it.

Except she has to make it. There’s no other option. Everybody else who was going into the area was already dead. She would kill them all if it meant that the whole country would be released from the oppression and the routine slaughter. 

Fucking hell she shouldn’t be thinking like this, those are children.

Children who would’ve died even without her. That was the whole point.

That’s what the games are for. They read out the treaty of treason every reaping. She’s heard it five times over, she knows that the games are in place to sow panic and quell rebellion because rebellious adults recieved reaped childred. 

Rebellious children got messy deaths.

She sat her arse down on that seat and started sketching. If these capitolite motherfuckers were going to look her in the eye, she was going to fucking blind them.

Chapter Text

They headed down to the training room bright and early. 

Blight had sent them off with a shoulder pat each and a ‘start with the survival stations, those things will save your life’. No restrictions, no strategy, just to give everything a fair shot and figure out where their strengths are. Any weaponry they wanted to learn in depth they would learn in private sessions with him and a trainer. 

District Seven did have the enviable position of being the complete middle of the pack. They could do anything and be overlooked for being ‘lower district’ but being good at something will still be overlooked because it wasn’t unusual to find a seven with upper body strength and physical fitness. Not like it would be for three, six or twelve.

She headed straight for the foraging station. 

She had a running theory that the plants station was updated each year in order to correlate with the arena in question so if she could identify the plants and the regions they are found in then she could predict what type of arena they were going to be thrown into.

The basics for all forested landscapes were present so she ignored those and started sifting through the plants she didn’t know. 

A few berries, juniper, wildflowers, agave, and a range of cacti.

Cacti.

They can’t be getting shipped off to a desert… 

The last desert-style arena was only three years ago. 

That would be too easy.

She scanned her eyes around the room.

The only other station that looked any different to how it was described in the movies or the books was the climbing station. It wasn’t just a ropes course. There was also rock climbing. Not with fun little colourful handholds, but actual rocks that they were given equipment to practise with to prevent falling.

Oh shit. 

Were they going to be dropped in the Grand Canyon?

She diverted her path away from the archery course (she’d never tried it before and wanted to know what the hype was about.) and walked straight across the room to the climbing station.

If she was going to be shoved down a gaping stone buttcrack, she was at the very least going to learn how to climb the hell out again.

She fell after five meters. 

She tried again.

She fell trying to push the first anchor point. But she made it eight meters.

It wasn't as easy as navigating branches or wrapping herself around a tree and scooching up like a koala.

She tried again.

Ten meters.

She finally got the hang of the belt clips and the rope.

Fifteen.

Twelve, the chalk bag dropped. She dropped shortly after.

Again. 

Nineteen and three anchors.

Twenty-two.

Twenty-eight. And past the ceiling beams.

Ceiling height and eleven anchors.

Again.

It takes two-thirds of the time.

Half.

Almost three-quarters when she starts tiring.

Again. 

They break for lunch.

She tries again.

Again.

Again.

There were only three people left in the training room. And two on the gamemaker’s balcony.

Female 12, Male 6 and her.

She moved over to axe throwing.

She repeated the course until she hit every target square in the face. 

She repeated it with knives. 

Then she tried her hand at the javelin, staff, jousting-looking thing.

A spear, the label said. 

She was crap.

She was worse with a trident.

She left the training room last. When the announcer on the speakers told her they were closing for the night.

—

She woke up sore.

There was a small platter of meat and eggs by her bed.

She downed a glass of water, scraped whatever she could reach into her mouth and passed out again.

—

She woke up in the early afternoon. Finally able to use her still sore muscles without feeling like death warmed over, she did a short calistenics routine before eating a full meal and drifting off again.

—

She went down to train at six pm. The centre was open until midnight.

She stayed the full six hours.

—

This was his fifth year of mentoring. 

His fifth year.

But the mentor’s lounge had never been so divided.

Blight was - for once - firm in the belief that one of his tributes would win.

Cashmere and Gloss were both staunchly disagreeing. The hints that they had gotten were pushing for a less survival-friendly terrain and it was generally accepted that the only people with any hope in an arena like that were the careers who would no doubt hoard the incredibly limited supplies. 

Beetee had already distanced himself from his tributes. Content to take a step back to ensure minimal emotional fallout. The two he was stuck with were bloodbath footage at best. He was sat by Blight and both were looking through the booklet (It looked more like a dictionary) of potential supplies. Not all the options for supplies would be included on the tablet but sometimes new options were added to the book that were often revealing about what sort of arena they were looking towards.

According to their - not at all quiet - whispers, the sevens had split up the activities between them. The boy was working with trainers in the mornings and circuiting around the survival stations on a loop in the afternoons when the girl from seven would arrive, often between three and six, and would always be the last one in the room. She would work on the new climbing wall (he was already nervous about that feature being added) for several hours, have a small break for food, by which point most of the others would have left, she would then do one or two sweeps of the survival stations, usually buying time for the others to leave.

Once there were none left, nobody had any clue what she was up to save her mentor and the game makers. And they weren’t spilling.

He had used up several favours to try and get the inside scoop and all information he had managed with his fishing lines, was that she sucked with a spear, a bow and a trident. The only confirmed ability was being able to swing an axe without hurting herself. She’s from seven, he’s pretty sure all the bark babies can do that. 

That left far too many options for his peace of mind.

He had ended up with a decent pair again this year. They’d been stepping it up at the academy with him on as a combat instructor and both his current tributes had been training with him for years. Both were on the older end of the spectrum and had very good odds according to the betting polls. But it all came down to the environment. 

He had prompted both of them to run through the gauntlet several times and also try out the climbing wall. 

He was very worried about the climbing wall.

It could easily be a mountain region. That hadn’t been done to any extent since the volcano in the 50th games. A steep mountain range would be enough cause for climbing instruction. He made a mental note to have them spend more time on it. Female 7 seemed to have the situation figured out.

Or at least her mentor did.

He mentally marked her down as a tribute to keep an eye on and turned to talk alliances with Cashmere, Gloss, Enobaria and Brutus. Mags wandered off to talk to (or rather talk at) Haymitch who was so far in the bottle he could very nearly not sit upright.

“So, we were deciding between keeping up until the final ten if all of them make it, and the final six if only a few of them make it.”

—

Johanna decided that she needed to get better with a ranged weapon. Something like particularly small throwing knives. A bow and arrow would’ve been ideal except for the fact that she’s so crap with them. 

But if the arena was going to be what she thought it was then the majority of the fighting would take place from a distance until the game makers started to herd them together nearer to the end. She was absolutely going for the cornucopia though. 

The whole set-up was pushing for a career win. Which made sense if you thought about it in the context of valuable winners. Snow couldn’t squeeze any additional prostitution money out of Annie because of her mental break. He was probably looking for another pretty female tribute from a career district to fill the Annie-sized gap in the market. A number of her sponsors were likely put out by the fact that she wasn’t up for grabs and were probably putting pressure on Snow.

Through that, District 1, 2 and 4’s girls were definitely the ones that were going to be favoured. 

Hanna knew that for all her value as a potential whore, she was far too isolated for it to work. She has no real friends except the orphans of seven who were being kept alive on Snow's (or at least the mayor he assigned) orders to act as placeholders to spare the efficiency of higher personnel. 

The only emotional connections he had that he could use were her chickens. Chickens that she ate whenever they got too old. He had no leverage on her so she would receive absolutely no aid in that department. Therefore she had to sort out her own sponsors. That meant a high score and a memorable character. Give the illusion that they could have her without following through or stating it outright. Plausible deniability.

It was a tightrope, a very thin one, but Original Johanna™ managed it without knowing if she would survive it and undoubtedly lost people’s lives in the decision.

Hanna had already ensured that she had nobody to lose.

—

On the final day of training, she spent all the daylight hours at the survival stations. She wasn’t going to strain her muscles the day before the interview and two days before the games. She was the fastest climber and she had learnt to use all of the climbing gear they had available. She asked for tips and ensured that she knew how to keep herself warm, and sheltered and how to treat minor injuries and self-apply basic first aid. She went over the plants she didn’t have first-hand experience with alongside their properties and then after everyone had left, she asked all the trainers left in the room to spar with her three on one. 

She lost the first time.

She was less lousy the second.

And after a few more rounds, he held her own for the agreed-upon five minutes.

—

“Female Tribute, District Seven.”

The careers had all returned from their individual sessions smug or pleased. One of the threes looked terrified and the other looked vaguely like what she imagined Doctor Frankenstein looked like when he finally succeeded at animating his monster.

The fives looked equally determined, the sixes were both thoughtful. She wondered if they had collaborated somehow with their district partners. Shown off complementary skills.

Johanna walked into the room and her steps echoed in the cavernous space without all the hustle and bustle of training tributes. It was vaguely eerie.

The gamemakers were all talking amongst themselves, a few spared her a couple of glances but apparently ‘Reif and Oceanelle’ had managed a long and short ranged weapon respectively. Based on the naming conventions, it was the fours. 

Now should she show them up…

She needed sponsors given the very short list of barely habitable ideas for what the arena could be.

She needed a higher score.

She went for the axes. 

She threw two of the lighter ones. 

Into the cracks and divots of the rock climbing wall.

She followed it up with a few larger knives, thrown in the same area. 

Then a spear, which miraculously hit where it was supposed to.

She forwent a harness, strapping a blade to her back, several small throwing knives to her legs and gripping a hunting knife between her teeth.

She ran.

She ran straight at the wall and just when she was about a meter or so away, she launched herself and latched onto the handle of one of the axes. 

She swung and grabbed the other. 

She hoisted herself up.

Axe, Axe, Knife, Knife, Knife, Rock, Knife, Rock, Rock, Spear.

She crouched at the top of the climbing wall like Spiderman on a lamppost. 

She grabbed the knife between her teeth and threw it as hard as she could towards the rope of a larger punching bag. 

It hit the floor with a crash that felt deafening in the silent chamber. 

She grabbed the knives next and pivoted slightly to face the arrays of vaguely child-shaped cutouts. 

Headshot.

Headshot.

Heart.

Throat.

Chest.

Groin.

Headshot.

She stood.

They were all crouched at the front of the balcony, heads tilted upwards at her. 

She unsheathed the blade on her back.

She stuck it into one of the two divots that ran down the wall and pushed into it as she slid back down. 

It slowed her just enough that she could roll to spread the impact without hurting herself. 

She bowed, turned, and walked away. 

Eight minutes and forty-three seconds. 

She had scaled the wall in under eight minutes.

She was getting really fucking good at that.

—

They gathered around the TV in the lounge together. It was her, Blight, the male tribute, Claudette, Sparrow, Tish, the rest of the prep team, all the avoxes (who had very quickly realised that they could relax a bit and do whatever they wanted once Blight very carefully dropped a bunch of rubbish or papers and such in front of any cameras in the main spaces.) and the peacekeepers who were supposed to be guarding the lift in case any tributes decided to get a bit sneaky before the games. 

She was about eighty percent sure they would be cheering for two.

But they came to sit down to watch with minimal fuss and no glances at the avoxes.

She noted down all the scores in her notebook next to the comments from the reaping. 

One and two were both predictably in the 7-10 range. The peacekeepers high-fived when the male tribute, Valerius (nicknamed Valour) got the only ten. 

The two threes both got fives.

The fours got an eight and a nine.

The fives and sixes both got scores in the 4-7 range.

Her district partner - Burleigh - managed a six to the general congratulations of the room.

Her face flashed across the screen. 

“Johanna, with a score of… ten.”

Oh fuck.

The room went up in cheers. The Avox who she was now certain was bringing her breakfast whenever she didn’t have the energy to leave the bed was bounding on the sofa with her fists in the air.

Both peacekeepers gave her little reserved pats on the shoulder.

Sparrow - the deceptively tiny thing that she was - plucked Hanna straight out of the armchair and swung her around the room in a parody of a dance.

The pair missed the rest of the scores until Burleigh gasped and her head snapped to the screen. Taro, the district eleven boy also managed a ten.

There were three of them.

Blight stepped out to make a call, eyes narrowed in thought.

—

Finnick cursed under his breath as Mags worked to calm their tributes down before they could work themselves up into treasonous behaviour or threats.

Two Non-careers held two of the three tens. 

If they knew how to play the game then Taro Yamaska and Johanna Mason would be allies by the time the sun rose. 

Johanna Mason had figured out the arena.

Oftentimes the gamemakers based their grading on the situation in the arena rather than in comparison with the other tributes. Either you know or have a skillset matching the arena, you show enough diversity to be ready for anything, or they want to put a target on your back. 

He was ninety percent certain that Johanna Mason knew exactly what she would be dealing with tomorrow and the careers were still split on what sort of climates their tributes might be faced with. Let alone the terrain. 

All they knew was that, unlike the forested arenas, they were unlikely to find any food outside of the cornucopia or sponsors. 

What the hell was it going to be?

He had his bets on a mountainside in cooler temps. That would ensure minimal plant life and possible snow as a water source if they made it further up.

Enobaria was pushing for an abandoned desert structure with no stairs and loot at the top. Scorching climate and no water. She was betting on a short game.

He flipped through his notes. 

• The increased price of water
• The increased price of food
• No, cookable/resealable food
• Climbing gear and safety harnesses added
• Helmets added
• Sunscreen was available, if costly
• Rope was also seeing a price increase

It just had to be a fucking mountain, right?

But that didn’t feel right. It was too obvious, too similar to what's been seen before. Plutarch had stepped down a few years ago and whoever designed last years shit show was probably dead so it was a new head gamemaker trying to cause a splash and start a legacy. 

He checked back at his list. They weren't increasing the prices of water. They had removed the smallest sized bottle and added and extra, larger size to the catalogue. They were actually marginally cheaper than they were before, it was just that the smallest, cheapest bottle wasn't available

He had a really bad feeling.

Would that mean that there would be no water at all readily available.

He looked up and met Mags' eye.

She had corralled the other two and the peacekeepers weren't looking so trigger happy anymore.

One of the reasons that Elle and Reef-y were picked was because they were two of the strongest swimmers. Especially after Annie's games.

Every two arenas shown, one will have a tribute who died drowning, be it in mug or quicksand or a river, a lake, a sea. Somebody will die drowning.

This wasn't going to be that type of arena. They had forgotten that as sensational as the plot twist; he hated looking at the slaughter of children that way; was, it got the last gamemaker at the very least demoted. Nobody would try for a water or arena again this year. Nor any arena capable of drowning somebody. So it was no sand, no swamp, no sea, no lake, probably not even a river. From all the clues given, it would be a dry rocky or mountainous terrain with dry heat and minimal plantlife which meant no fauna aside from mutts.

They were out of their depth.

Chapter Text

“Johanna, Darling!”

Sparrow flounced into her bedroom in the most terrifying set of heels known to man. They were functionally stilts.

“I had a little shuffle through your ideas, they are to die for honestly,” Hanna cringed slightly, “And I have to say the high collar with the open back I’ll probably have to save for a capital party, all the fun details would be hidden away for the interview! It’s just not right to do that to such a gorgeous dress. So I went with the second option that you provided!” 

Sparrow flung a makeup bag at one of the three lads on the prep team. They immediately got to work.

Tish wheeled in a mannequin, slightly flushed but looking very accomplished. 

They were continuing the plant theme it seemed. 

She had originally designed the dress in gold but apparently ‘it’ll wash you out on stage dearie, you are gorgeously tanned so the colour would match too closely to your skin’. Instead, what was revealed was a very structured dress entirely made up of incredibly realistic water lilies and lilypads. 

It was a short dress, which meant that three pairs of tights had been set aside to try and blur her leg muscles, and several gold cuffs and a necklace to distract from her arm and shoulder muscles. 

That was, afterall, the driving force behind helping to design the outfits. She wanted to stand out but only do so for being pretty and interesting for sponsors, not for being an actual challenge or a target for the careers.

The skirt of the dress was deliberately asymmetric on the side facing the audience in order for the train of the skirt to give some cover to her thighs and calves. The whole point is drawing attention away from her as an individual and towards the dress itself for being attention-grabbing.

“We have been assured that the chairs are wide enough for you to sit without ruining the skirt. I want this back in tip top shape missy, I’m going to put it up as a gallery piece in the boutique that we’re designing! I’ve pulled a few strings as well dear - I’ve been in the business long enough to manage that much - so there will be a camera in the prep room whilst we wait for you to get all queued up. The magazine has agreed to publish a copy with your photo on the cover in one of these dresses. You’ve started a trend dear and this way you’ll be remembered for more than being a district born commoner.” She beamed, shuffling through papers and handing over a few sample shots in what was very obviously the lounge on floor seven of the tribute center.

“You want me to put on the dress and heels three hours early so you can get what are essentially promo shots for the outcome that I die in the arena?”

“Well,” she looked a little put out but her stare hardened and she pushed on, “These shots specifically will be released the second you go on stage for your interview, so you will be alive for it and it might help to rake in sponsors!”

Realistically, none of the other tributes will find out unless Burleigh decided to develop loose lips. Given the way he had been glaring at anybody who dared to look his way it was unlikely.

She wasn’t the only one in water lilies, it turned out. When she made it out of her room, she found both her mentor and her district partner in similar attire. Both were wearing clothes designed to match hers. Burleigh was in an open robe designed to show off what the stylists were calling ‘washboard abs’ but were just the result of hard manual labour and not enough to eat. His ribs were expertly covered in the draped fabric and the flowers by the sleeves and the hems helped to draw away focus. 

Regardless of her lacking creativity, Sparrow was hired for a reason.

Blight was in a three piece suit in the same colour scheme, a lily pinned to his jacket.

“Well let's start with a group shot and then we can start pulling you apart for individual shots all at the same time to cut down on how long it’ll take!”

The impromptu photoshoot took two hours.

Two whole hours that the other tributes were using to discuss media strategy and practice interview questions.

The photos better do what Sparrow promised they would.

Tish turned out to be the dictator in this setting however, she was calling out orders and berating the staff for the lighting and the angles and the background and accidental costume overlap when she and Blight were both having photos taken on opposite ends of the sofa. 

One hour to go.

—

They make it to the bottom of the lift and are led through a tunnel-like passage to the ‘auditorium’. They are, of course, The seventh pair to make it down. The others were already lined up. Their stage directions are delivered in short clipped words. They leave the little corridor, they have their interview, and then they take a seat at their designated table in the semicircle of chairs and tables around the back of the stage. There will be small bites to eat. They are allowed to eat them. Johanna was going on stage at the exact halfway point. Her interview is following the boy from six. She hadn’t heard a word out of him for the almost-week they’d been in proximity with each other.

She took the chance to look around at the outfits. 

Nobody really keeps to themes for the interview. It is far more geared to bringing out the assets of the individual than actually displaying their districts. It is probably the most even ground that anybody is on for the whole game. 

The only downside is the further down the list you are, the more likely the audience is to lose interest. But that is made up for in leaps and bounds by the reputation of District Eleven for producing taller, stronger male tributes. 

The sponsors at least should stay tuned to the end if only to assess the competition to their betting horses.

Caesar is also backstage, but on the other side. 

She could see him through the curtains. 

The silver theme prevails. 

His hair, his eyebrows. If she got close enough she was sure his eyelashes were the same metallic shade. 

He was getting slapped in the face by a stern looking man holding a huge powder puff. 

She squinted.

Where did she have to apply to get a job like that?

She checked over her dress and recentered her wrist and arm cuffs. Burleigh was compulsively pulling his robe tighter around himself.

She wondered if he was chilly or just incredibly insecure.

Either way he was a fourteen year old being sexualised for capitol entertainment. Not that sixteen was much better, but at least she was aware of what all the stares meant.

The seating area was buzzing now. It was open air, the ampitheatre backing onto the parade aisle and the city circle was packed with VIP and Priority seating. There were the balconies too. Only two of them were in use as actual seating, the rest were filled to the weight limit with media and film crews. 

Tish speed walked over just as Caesar took to the stage.

“Okay, so we’ve managed to finagle it with a bunch of rough prints. The main bodies of the magazine have all been printed ahead of time so it’s just the cover shot and the inserts that took the last hour or so to print.” She took in a huge gulp of air before continuing to whisper under her breath “The whole warehouse was up in arms about it. But we should start selling them during the break, right before you go out on stage. I could not have physically timed it better. The only person receiving one ahead of time was President Snow’s granddaughter Martia Snow. That was a part of his deal seeing as she was in the room whilst we were calling him and got so excited about it. Her copy includes a special edition of the photoshoot with quadruple the photos as well as a poster that I need you to sign, so she hopefully won’t be bored of looking at it by the time you’re on stage!” 

Hanna nodded along when she was prompted to. And signed the huge glossy roll when a corner was stretched flat for her to write on. The ink shimmered gold.

Surely the situation with Martia Snow could only be a good thing. 

If anything it means that the only person she could be feasibly called on to entertain was Martia herself. She could somehow spin it to market herself as exclusive which the kid would love because Hanna would turn down all her equally rich friends in favour of her. She could make herself a status symbol.

It would suck, but it would keep her alive.

Okay, new goal, become a feminist icon whilst in the arena. 

How would she even do that? 

She had time to figure it out, surely.

Either way, she wouldn’t be figuring it out now.

“The Queen of District One!”

Hanna watched the first tribute, District One Female named Regina, take to the stage.

Her dress was - at its core - a short silk nightgown. Though the stylist managed to place strategic ruffled over her bust and hips to give the illusion of curves she did not have.

She tuned them out. Tish flapped a hand and waved a phone about. Her lackeys, the male prep team workers, immediately speed walking over to her and Burleigh

“A gemstone among rocks, Ladies and Gentlemen give it up for District one’s Jasper!”

The false lashes went on and she had to lift her face up and fan her eyes to try and speed up the glue drying. 

“The Glory of District Two, Welcome Gloria!”

Her highlighter was reapplied.

“For Victory and Valour, Valerius Of District 2!”

She actually got to watch this interview, though it wasn’t the greatest. He was going for aloof and broody but it hit closer to moody teen.

“She’s going to light up your screen all the way from District Three, Electra!”

Where did Caesar come up with these one liners? 

They weren’t even that interesting and they barely allowed for any substantial conversation. 

“There’s a snake in the grass! It's Python of District Three!”

Was he named after a coding language?

Or the animal?

He did look a bit snakey with his wide-set eyes and pointed face.

“Oceanelle, the siren of the seas of District Four!”

“My friends call me Elle! Far less hassle.”

Another standard interview, though she did learn that the girls in four were often named longer words that were broken up into nicknames. Anemone Cresta shortened to Annie.

“Put your hands together for Reif, the fortress of the ocean floor!”

Did he forget the district number on purpose or was the name Reif more obvious and Oceanelle somehow?

“She shimmers in the sky, Aurora, the princess of District Five!”

“Provider of riches, Pluto of District Five!”

Both were terribly nervous but she managed to avoid watching them both stutter through their questions when her hands were snatched for a different set of false nails to be glued down.

Nairobi and Jett of Six were surprisingly good conversationalists, if a little bland. They answered perfectly but they were too sure in their answers for Caesar to manage to draw out any gossip or drama.

Then came the five minute intermission.

She watched as what looked to be hundreds of staff members wielding crates of magazines wove through the crowds taking payment and distributing her picture out.

Even the gamemakers seemed surprised. 

Snow, up in his balcony, waved benevolently down at his people who began clambering over one another to get a better view. 

Tish snagged a copy for Hanna.

“District Seven’s New Look! Designed by Tribute Johanna Mason of the 71st games.” 

The photo was of Johanna sitting looking almost regal on one of the grandfather chairs they had in the lounge, both boys stood behind her, each with a hand on the backrest of the chair. She herself was slumped in what she thought at the time was exhaustion but came across as artful.

Instead of grumpy she looked unapproachable. They had managed to edit the photo so that the flowers on her dress trailed down into what looked like a pond underfoot.

She was genuinely impressed.

Caesar took to the stage again and the lights in the audience dulled.

“Welcome Back to this year's screening of the Seventy First Annual Hunger Games!”

The crowd roared.

“We have already spent the first portion of the evening interviewing out tributes from the first six districts. Therefore it is my honour to introduce to you, The Flower of Panem, District Seven’s Johanna Mason!”

The cheering was deafening.

Johanna walked out into the light and the volume somehow increased.

She took two careful steps forward as she blinked the light out of her eyes but once she could see again she walked with purpose. 

A lifetime of wearing heels to any and all important events and to guest lectures made it easy to powerwalk straight to Caesar. 

Heel, Toe. Heel toe.

She imagined a boom of lightning with every step she took.

She grabbed Caesar's hand and kept walking to the edge of his raised platform, not allowing him to direct her to a seat. 

He was playing along perfectly. 

They strode to the middle of the ledge and - after a split second where he caught her eye - lifted their joint hands into the air.

“Johanna Mason everybody!”

She kept her expression straight as the people in the front row jumped up and down and wailed like hyenas, reaching for her over the stage.

She kept her eyes forward.

“Johanna! May I call you Johanna?” He didn’t pause for an answer as he guided her back to the seaing arrangement. “You look positively radiant, and the dress! This is one of yours is it not?”

He leaned over with the mic. She deflected.

“It is my concept piece, but Sparrow did all the legwork.”

She watched as the cameras swiveled to find Sparrow who had stood from her seat in the crowd.

The cameras panned back.

“Of course, of course” He waffled on for a moment about the brilliance of the stylists and the work they put into the games before circling back to Johanna with one of the questions he had asked every year to the highest scorers. 

“So, how about that training score? One of the three tens. Give us a hint of what happened there.”

“Well,” She started off flicking her eyes over to the gamemakers, a few were nodding encouragingly so she took it as permission, “There was a new piece of equipment added special for this year you know?”

Caesar's interest shone in his eyes, his back straightened and he twisted slightly, angling himself towards me. “I did not know, tell me more.”

“It’s this huge climbing wall that goes all the way up to the roof. And I was wondering, since it was new, if it would help out scores in the assessment.”

She knew that Caesar could tell there was more to it but he allowed her to keep her strategy.

“So I climbed it.”

“You… Climbed it.” He looked baffled but the gamemakers were laughing uproariously. It was obvious that he was missing something.

She nodded with an ignorant smile, “Very quickly.”

Seneca Crane was not the head gamemaker yet, he would be starting out next year, the previous year’s gamemaker was shot dead when the dam broke and effectively ruined the final showdown. Instead it was Plutarch Heavensbee, out of retirement for one game and one game only. He was howling with laughter in the front seat.

“I see.” He did not see.

“And have you got any strategies going in?”

She paused, “I suppose I'm a decent runner.” She had the fastest time on the training room leaderboard, she had been sprinting long distances everyday for years. “And I guess I can fight closed range well.” She had worked her way up to fighting four personal trainers to a standstill for a length of time. “I’m also good at identifying plants.” It was her major in university before she was Johanna. “So I reckon I have a pretty good shot.” She was going to win.

Caesar traded off a few words to the audience trying to hype her up and the buzzer rang. 

She stood, thanked Caesar, the audience and then turned to bow to both the game maker’s balcony and Snow’s balcony.

She took her seat back with the rest of the tributes around the edge of the stage.

She hoped it would end soon.

—

“We got a call in from District Eleven!”

Claudette announced the moment he stepped onto the floor where they were lounging and snacking whilst going over strategy with Blight.

“Oh yeah? Wha’ they say?” Burleigh drawled

He didn’t even bother to twitch from his position, or even sound interested, draped upside down over the back of the sofa.

“Their male tribute wants an alliance with Johanna so long as she promises to help him look out for his female tribute.”

“I’ll do it if he keeps an equal eye out for Budleigh. Fair trade and all that.”

Claudette squinted consideringly before bouncing back out into the hall to make the call.

“As I was saying, whilst it is safest to run away from the cornucopia or to only pick off the bags furthest to the edge, this year’s arena is looking less and less hospitable the more we learn about it so-”

“They called back!” Claudette skipped into the room “he said-”

—

“They agreed to an alliance.” Enobaria seethed.

Finnick despaired.

“Two of the heaviest hitters score wise are working together.”

They were fucked.

Anal, no lube, raw.

Some girl who had no known history, no background, didn’t even have an approved token, or any token, and the historically consistent heavy-duty male tribute from Eleven. Both with equally top scores. Both with no real precedent set for how this would work out.

And one of whomst, had figured out what the arena would be ahead of time.

Unless they managed a miracle on par with his donated trident, he didn’t see either of his tributes making it to the final five. 

How depressing.

He gathered himself together. Prodded concealer under his eyes and steeled himself. He had a client to meet with tonight. Hopefully he could pull a few strings, hint at a favour, make that miracle happen.

He left the kids with Mags who was gesturing to a crudely drawn circle, marker crosses at different points as she gestured out routes and potential meeting points. 

—

She slept like the dead.

It was her favourite habit. Right before a stressful situation, i.e. a wedding or an exam, Hanna would conk out and was dead to the world for a minimum of eight hours. No exceptions.

She woke with the sun, Blight nudging her awake with a cup of tea held out for her. He handed her a set of tracksuits. No underwear. Simple to pull off when she reached the catacombs under the arena. They walked to the lift and he pushed the button for the roof.

They stood waiting for around three minutes when a hovercraft appeared out of thin air. The cloaking technology was something out of a videogame. A ladder dropped down.

She stared at it distrustfully. 

Blight gave her a small shrug and nudged her forwards. Pulling the mug from her hands. She put her hands and feet on the ladder and braced herself. 

Yup.

She was frozen. 

What seemed to be a minor electrical impulse ran through her muscles, tensing them so she had no hope of letting go as she was lifted into the vehicle. She stayed stuck until a bloke in a white coat inserted what he claimed to be a tracker into her left forearm.

A moment after as the tracker was in place, the ladder released her. 

The doctor guy walked back into a different section of the hovercraft and the ladder dropped back down to pick up Blight.

An Avox boy came in and directed them to a room where breakfast had been laid out. 

She pulled together all of the meats, the breads and other carbs. She needed to eat enough to give her the energy to get through the day. 

She spent the ride picking at her plate, slowly but surely demolishing the mountain of food.

She looked out the window.

America looked so vastly different that it was barely recognisable as the same country.

If it weren’t for the accents and the climate, she wouldv’e assumed to be somewhere else entirely. 

Her accent must be so weird. 

She was fucking Cornish.

Her nan, who she had lived with since she was three, was from Mousehole and spoke like it.

The accent had absolutely followed her as well. In both speech and writing. 

The only real time she spent in America was for her Uni years. She managed a scholarship for MIT and hadn’t been back to England since. She hadn’t been able to afford the cost of flying on her student budget.

The ride lasted a half hour before the view disappeared and the windows went dark. 

The hovercraft landed and it felt like she had been forcefully shoved into her body. 

The ladder dropped them into a tube underground, like the old war bunkers.

The stockyard (known to the capitol as the launch site) was silent. All the doors were closed as they walked around the slowly curving path. 

One door had been left open and light spilled through the entryway. The sign next to it said ‘Launch Room,’ with a small card slid into position underneath stating it was for ’D7 F’. She wondered briefly if the rooms were randomised or if they were put into certain places on purpose.

Everything seemed pristine.

There wasn’t a speck of dust and all of the facilities had the ‘just peeled off the plastic’ shine to them.

Everything was brand-new, she would be the first and only tribute to use this Launch Room.

The arenas were considered historic sites, preserved after the Games. 

Popular destinations for Capitol residents to visit, to vacation. Go for a month, rewatch the Games, tour the catacombs, visit the sites where the deaths took place. You can even take part in reenactments. They say the food is excellent. 

She showered and cleaned her teeth. She twisted her hair into a plaited crown around her head, it would not be a liability.

The clothes arrive with an avox, the same for every tribute. 

It looked like a uniform of some sort.

Black, red and silver. Tight legging-like pants with a few large external pockets, Long sleeved top as an underlayer with a vest to go over it. A lightweight jacket that cinched the vest against her skin. It was built for mobility. No loose fabric. Nothing that could get caught. 

It was designed the same way gym wear was in her old life. Breathable, stretchy and light. 

It was going to be a warm arena. 

She knew she had hit the jackpot, however, when she saw the boots.

Heavy duty, high top boots with ropes for laces and metal clasps. Thick soles with as much grip on them as possible. 

They were climbing boots.

She felt the grin she had been suppressing for days stretch across her cheeks. 

The whole set fit perfectly but she adjusted it anyway. 

Pulling the leggings slightly higher to give her enough bunched fabric to do a split without straining the material, the pockets also came up higher allowing for easier access. She did the boots up as tight as she could get them and then ran around pushing off the walls to make sure they wouldn’t slip.

Blight just watched, fascinated.

She ate a handful of nuts and had a final glass of water when a voice announced that it was time to launch. 

She walked over to the metal plate that was elevated slightly from the floor.

She turned around and Blight gave her a small middle fingered salute. She laughed and sent one back. He left the room at a sprint, hopefully to get set up in the Mentor’s Lounge.

The glass lowered around her.

Silence.

A truly unnerving silence for all of ten seconds and then she started to rise.

It was dark for another twenty seconds. She counted.

Then there was open air. 

Dusty open air.

Recognisable open air.

For a moment she was again blinded by bright light and then her vision focussed, her hair standing on end. She spotted the cornucopia, a huge silver structure shaped like a horn, but her focus strays. 

Her eyes linger on the huge constructs of layered rock.

Then she heard the announcer, his voice booming all around her.

“Ladies and gentlemen, let the Seventy-first Annual Hunger Games begin!”

She suppressed the cackle that bubbled up in her throat. She was sure her face was twisting itself into a beaming grin.

She was right.

They had sent her into a mesa.

Chapter Text

The mentors didn’t know what they were looking at.

The tributes were stood in a small clearing in the middle of a few huge rocks.

They were mountainous tables of rocks that seemed to have melted over each other, building structures that rose into huge flat peaks.

They watched as the main screen circled round to show off all the tributes.

They all looked terrified.

All of them except for Mason.

A chill ran down his spine and he straightened unconsciously.

Mason looked like the cat who caught the canary, her smile was a thing of nightmares.

Blight was also snickering under his breath.

He checked the screen enough and her district partner was also scanning the layout but he didn't look confused he looked like he was searching for something.

How the fuck could she have guessed this. Did her mentor know as well?

He didn’t even know what this was.

The girl was grinning something fierce up on that podium, smile so wide that all her back teeth were visible. She looked like a shark.

Her face was triumphant, so much so that it was bound to be commented on in the ‘livestream’. The livestream that was about thirty seconds belated to give the editors time to cut anything treasonous or ‘too grotesque’. He watched with growing trepidation as the tributes around her shuffled as far from her as they could get on their podiums.

The boy from Eleven who got the ten had spotted her, and in response to her clear satisfaction, decided to play up the persona he had used on stage.

He slowly, methodically, stretched out his joints as the timer ticked down. Every inch the preditor jungle cat.

Finnick watched the dread bloom on his tribute's faces.

Chaff and Seeder, looking only a little worse for wear after Johanna beamed down at them from the big screen, were sneakily high-fiving over in the corner when their male tribute turned to face her. The pair were only three podiums apart and both looked to be going for the blood bath.

The other career mentors turned to take stock of each other.

The closest to figuring it out had been Finnick himself and he had directed his tributes to spend extra time at the climbing wall but he wasn’t too sure yet if it was too little, too late.

He would wait until the end of the bloodbath. Once he knew they would both make it, he would start adjusting his strategy.

—

She had sixty seconds.

Sixty seconds to get the lay of the land, figure out the positions of her allies and enemies whilst the clock ticked down.

She glanced to her left. 

12 female, Char, 15 years old, both her and her brother Cole were reaped. Their parents probably did something stupid.

Next to her, two platforms away, was Reif from four. He looked green around the gills and it didn’t take a genius to figure out why. Char was going to turn around and immediately run for a hiding spot, which would leave him stuck between Johanna herself on his far right and Taro directly to his left.

She checked her other side.

Shank, the boy from district ten was next to her and on his other side was Gloria from district one.

They were positioned around the side of the cornucopia, Johanna was directly diagonal to one of the walls of its mouth. Mathematically, she was probably the shortest distance away from the actual structure, unless she counted the people nearer to the tail. 

Twenty Seconds.

She could see Burleigh and Almond (District 11’s female tribute) who were spread relatively far apart on the other side. 

She caught Taro’s eye and he nodded when she flicked her eyes over.

He gestured for the girl to turn around and run. That they would come and find her.

Ten seconds and people were geting antsy. They needed to be careful or they could accidentally launch off early or get too close to the edge and trigger the land mines set to blow their legs off.

They were deactivated the millisecond the timer hit zero, it was automatic and there was no margin of error.

It was risky but she started to time it.

Ten seconds. 

She crouched slightly, not low for a sprint the way the other tributes were, but just enough to get some spring.

Five.

She sent up a short prayer to a god she didn’t believe in.

Three. 

Two. 

She breathed in.

One.

She launched. 

Before the timer hit zero.

Before the other tributes could get started.

She didn’t go for height, she went for distance.

She touched ground just as the clock hit zero.

She was off sprinting.

She extended her legs as far as they could go and pushed off. High knee, Flat foot, coordinated arms.

She flew.

She went straight for the back of the cornucopia, ignoring everything scattered at the entrance.

There were belts of carabiners and rope and nails and pegs. 

She strapped the most stocked one she could find around her waist. Slung a second one over her shoulder

She grabbed a set of throwing knives on a thigh harness, clipped that to her belt with a strap for good measure.

Then the screaming started.

She could barely hear it.

That blood was rushing through her ears as she counted down her self-awarded thirty seconds, she grabbed a larger backpack. Opened the top and stuffed a few large knives inside, then the second belt was squished on top, then two of the nearest bundles of rope.

She shut it and swung it onto her back.

She took a quick scan around. Ten seconds before she had to run.

Two axes.

They looked like they were perfectly her size, hung against the wall like a reward. 

She grabbed them both.

She ran.

Straight past a brawl happening between two boys at the opening, She threw a hunting knife at the larger boy, not even sparing it more than a cursory glance. 

Straight past a threesome of careers with their backs together fighting off the slower tributes with small knives.

She made it thirty meters away, in the direction of Taro’s charge before spinning on her heel.

She narrowed her eyes and swung her arm.

The axe went sailing through the air and landed with a sick crunch in the skull of District One’s male tribute, Jasper.

Twin screams rung out as the two girls who were with him heard him die.

She didn’t stay to watch him hit the ground. She just ran.

She could see Taro up ahead, he made off with far less than she did but it was still a good haul. He had a medium backpack, a sickle of somekind and several coils of rope stuffed in his pockets.

She ran straight past them.

“With me!”

She didn’t slow down but she did hear their footsteps behind her under the screaming. 

She ran straight at the biggest pillar that she had spotted from her podium.

It was time to go climbing.

—

Chaos.

Everybody was screaming, scanning through their tablets, yelling at other mentors. 

Blight was drenched with nerves.

Because of course Johanna would go straight for the cornucopia and of course she somehow managed to get in and out with no issues, and of course she just killed one of the two tributes with the best odds and the highest number of bidders in tha damned games. Why would she do anything else?

The brat was going to give him an aneurysm.

Never before had he been so conflicted. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to crawl in a hole until all the screaming died out or prance around like a peacock with his chest puffed up. 

He could almost hear District Seven cheering from here.

She was their most promising tribute in what felt like decades.

Johanna’s sponsor money started off as the eighth highest, but that was just when the early sponsor money had trickled in. 

This little show she put on just opened up the floodgates.

It was the most amount of money he had seen for a single tribute from Seven ever. And it had barely been five minutes.

His screen right now was showing Johanna scaling the rock formation with nothing but an axe and a dream, she plugged pins into cracks and holes whenever she could find them, threading a rope through as she went. She left each of the three at the bottom with some sort of attachment and a knife each. They seemed to be waiting for her to reach the top, and she was only another minute or so away.

He turned back to his tablet. 

He sorted through the guide and pressed what he thought to be the most useful into the ‘favourites’ tab. It included every size of water, a few cheaper meals, rope, night vision goggles and another set of throwing knives.

He knew that she wanted the highest ground so she could pick off other tributes with ranged weaponry and the knives worked fine.

Burleigh’s finances weren’t looking anywhere near as good. Though he also hadn’t done much of anything to earn any money.

He scanned the crowd as Johanna anchored a pin and slammed it into a crevice in the rock with the flat of her axe. 

Mags and Finnick stood over their section, he was going through the catalogue at a record place whilst she was scanning through the map and pinning several locations. 

One of their tributes made it through the bloodbath fine, the other ended up with a knife in the leg and made the decision to stick it out on her own, waiting for the career pack to end rather than being dead weight.

A good decision given the precedent set in the past.

He looked at his map. 

His tributes had chosen an incredibly central position, barely a fifteen minute walk from the cornucopia (the could see it from their platform), which meant that they wouldn’t have to do anywhere near as much moving, and, if they were having a feast, they were going to end up being some of the closest to the cornucopia. They could conserve energy and cut down on food.

He watched as she fed a rope through the funky looking pin, holding the other end in her hand and she seemed to clamp it around the rope. 

The big screen - the only one with volume - seemed to realise she was doing something interesting and flickered over to her. It showed a cut down and sped up journey of her scaling the rocks before catching up to where she was now. 

“Okay!” She yelled down. “Send the lightest one up first, clip the rope through your pegs like I told you!”

She got a thumbs up from Taro and steeled herself against the rock, feet dug in and legs locked.

The little girl, with help from her district partner, adjusted the pseudo harness fashioned out of rope and clipped herself to the rope through a different little metal contraption.

“Remember what Johanna said,” Taro held her shoulders steady as he lectured her. "The clip is designed so that whilst the rope will go through easy when you’re going up, it’ll stop you from sliding back down so all you gotta do is walk up the side of the rock. If you need a break then take a quick break it’ll all be fine.”

“Just walk.” The girl repeated.

“Just walk.” He echoed back.

And so she did, when she was about halfway up, Johanna had pushed in a second peg further back, insurance in case the first one failed. 

“You can send up the next! It should hold!”

Burleigh was fastened in next. They were going a little slower now that he had to adjust his course to match Almonds but they were making it up safely. 

Johanna had gone ‘round to the other side and seemed to be installing a second round of pins to the middle of the platform attached to a different type of rope and secured by Johanna slamming the butt of her axe into it repeatedly, and when she couldn’t push it in any further, screwing it down. The rope itself was long, flat and black and stayed attached to her as she moved around.

He watched her try to pull it out, arms straining and face flushed with effort.

It didn’t budge.

She then took a hunting knife to the rope.

It didn't tear or even fray.

He had no clue what she was doing, but she glowed with quiet smugness. 

Her head shot up when little hands slapped down on the surface of the rock. 

She sprinted over, rope trailing behind her like a leash. 

At least she didn’t seem to be lacking energy. 

She looked comical stood next to the tiniest tribute in the arena. Almond was thirteen but she was the height of a ten year old. Common for girls in eleven.

Johanna unclipped her and the girl staggered to the middle of the platform to collapse on shaky legs. She looked like a newborn fawn.

Burleigh sped up once Almond had been unclipped, He made it to the top in what would’ve been an impressive time had Johanna not gone first. And she did it whilst securing it for the others.

Taro had just got himself clipped in when the announcers started hooting. 

The career pack had decided to spread out once most of the bloodbath had ended. The girl from four and the boy from two had stayed behind to ‘clean up’ whilst the others, the girl from Two and the boy from Four went off together with nothing but a small medical pack and their weapons of choice. 

They were headed straight for the ‘Seven-Eleven Alliance’ as Claudius Templesmith had taken to calling them. It didn't seem very funny but both announcers chuckled whenever it was spoken aloud.

Johanna who had been watching him clip himself in from the top spotted them first. 

She didn’t yell out to warn him. Instead she shouted down.

“Tie a good, strong knot underneath the clip!” 

He looked up confused but did as he was told.

The careers were gaining on them like sharks smelling blood. 

Johanna ducked back onto the platform once he started ascending.

She undid the second pin and grabbed onto the rope.

“Burleigh!” She was getting a bit frantic now that she couldn’t see over the edge, “Burleigh, I need you to undo the latch and switch its direction, then join us, we’re gonna pull him up.” 

Almond seemed to get with the picture. 

He looked over and both Seeder and Chaff were vibrating with tension.

“Undoin' it, NOW!”

They stumbled slightly under his weight but the pin held and Johanna got her feet under her. They started pulling the rope back, helping to haul him up faster.

Taro had looked terrified for all of three seconds before he realised what was happening. Then he just looked determined.

He let go of the rope and stopped pulling against them, instead he put his hands onto the wall and started scaling it like a spider, pulling the pegs attached to the wall out on the way up.

The careers looked dumbfounded. 

The mentors looked dumbfounded.

Taro hadn’t even realised that he was supposed to be rushing.

Caesar was talking a mile a minute about how ‘Exciting it all was’ and ‘What a close call, that Johanna sure is something, and Taro too, do we reckon he could have made it up even without the rope?’

“Your tribute is FUCKING MENTAL!”

It took a moment for Blight to realise that he was the one being screamed at.

Seeder had vaulted over a sofa and lunged onto his torso, grappling him like a vine.

“WHERE THE HELL DID YOU FIND HER! I OWE THAT GIRL MY FIRSTBORN!”

Everybody who wasn’t already was staring now. Seeder had vowed not to have any children after seeing what happened to Beetee so he wasn’t too worried about Johanna being sent a random child in the post.

“How did she know that Taro gets jittery when he’s nervous? That is why she didn’t tell him about the careers right? If I didn’t have my own tributes to worry about I'd be shitting bricks about yours. What was she thinking? She’s smart as hell, almost too smart.” 

And she trailed off, unlatching herself and mumbling, returning back to her station to watch Taro and Almond collapse into each other on the platform.

“So,” Johanna drawled, startling the other tributes. Her voice loud on the big screen “Is now a good time to explain that two of the careers were approaching when we started pulling you up.”

The flush on the faces of the other three, from the exertion of pulling and climbing, drained so fast that they looked grey.

Johanna had her back to them, fiddling with the knife in her hand. It was one of the smaller ones from her thigh strap. She was looking out over the arena, they couldn’t see what she had her eye on with the angle of the camera but Blight had a very good guess.

She drew back her arm. 

And threw. 

The camera angle switched. 

A clean shot played of the knife embedding itself into the right shoulder of the boy from two. 

He screamed.

Enobaria screamed with him.

The camera flicked back up to Johanna. 

She was wearing the same grin she had when she rose out of the ground and into the arena like a vengeful spirit.

She was horrifying.

The little girl from Eleven gasped but it was less fearful than he would've expected.

“How did you aim from all the way up here?” Her hushed voice held no small amount of awe.

Taro looked equally impressed.

Johanna just grinned her Cheshire grin. 

She had ruined Valerius’ dominant arm.

She had also set him up for a slow death if he doesn’t manage to get medicine in time. 

Enobaria seemed to agree. 

She was screaming with incoherent rage as she scrolled through the lists of meds, all of the prices were coloured red. She couldn’t afford any of the formulas that were good enough to actually fix him yet.

Blight turned back to Johanna as she started looking through her pack.

—

“Rope, rope, more rope, an unfoldable sheet of plastic that I don’t understand what i'm supposed to do with, the knives I stashed on top of everything, a large bottle of water, five packets of food, three tins of food, a one use stove top to heat the tinned food, a sleeping bag, a pop-up one-man tent, a small med-kit, a firestarter kit and matches, spare belt. No iodine tablets, so there probably isn’t a water source, either that or the water source is made of drinking water.”

She kept out the tent and the sleeping bag and beatly packed everything else away, leaving enough room at the top of the bag to stuff in the rest of her gear in a rush.

“Blight, if you're hearing this, save my damn money until I actually need it.”

She turned to find the others going through what they brought.

Autumn managed to snag a small pack with straps barely wide enough to go around her leg. It held a floppy water skin filled and a mini packet of beef jerky. Just enough to tide her over. 

Burleigh had also taken the time to grab a few things. He brought a backpack, the ones from right at the edge of the cornucopia only slightly further in than the crap on the outskirts, it was tiny but it also had water food, and a small sewing kit, which, she checked her med-pack, nobody else had.

Taro had a smug grin on and he was relaxing like a particularly fat cat.

“I got a backpack, two tinned food, protein bar, water, tent, matches, grasshook, knife from Jo.”

“So we should be good for at least a few days then.” Johanna looked around. “We can lay low for now until we learn who all is still here, then tomorrow I wanna get movin’. I wanna at least see what sort of plant life we can find so if the game runs long we have sommit ta’ eat.”

All three nodded.

She was glad for the quiet. 

She wondered briefly if she was on screen. The situation with the careers would probably be one of those overtensed highlight moments with super dramatic music. She bit down a smirk. 

The first day was always the choppiest in terms of the order of the narrative. They usually kept a little clock in the corner or split the screen so that it was more obvious when things were happening all at once. There were always so many deaths to show on day one that the footage of them essentially sunbathing on a big rock might only make funny contrasting music to cut in and out of an action-packed fight.

She wondered how many people were betting on her. She’d wager it’s far more today than it was yesterday.

The persona that she played up worked at least, nobody was out to get her specifically, and she wasn’t considered weak enough to be hunted down as ‘easy pickings’. She was unashamed to admit to herself that she absolutely and blatantly used Taro as a distraction when she made it to the cornucopia.

They relaxed for a little while as the sun started to go down.

The cannons started firing.

The careers must have finished dragging out the deaths of the kids caught in the cornucopia. They never collect the bloodbath bodies until the killers have dispersed. On the opening day, they don’t even fire the cannons until the initial fighting’s over because it’s too hard to keep track of the fatalities.

Johanna counted alongside Taro. Their voices came out in synchronized whispers. 

One, Boom. 

Two, Boom.

Three . . . and on and on until they reached Twelve. 

Exactly half were dead. 

They were silent for a few minutes as they watched the hovercraft glide over the cornucopia.

Half left in play. 

“Well,” Taro broke the silence, “All our odds just doubled.”

It was a bad joke. A shit one, barely a joke at all.

Johanna burst into giggles anyway.

Chapter Text

They decided that the girls would take the tent and Johanna's sleeping bag and the boys would sleep outside on watch with the other.

It was both insurance and also they all knew that they owed Johanna their lives. sShe had absolutely no shame when she set both the boys up for a watch rotation.

The sun finally set and the anthem blared through the arena.

Right above them in the middle of the sky was the seal of the capitol. She was certain she remembered something about it being a giant screen being held up by a disappearing hovercraft

The anthem faded out and the sky went dark. 

In Seven, they would've been shown full coverage of each and every killing, but that was decided to have given an unfair advantage to the living tributes. 

For instance, if Johanna’s incident with Valerius and the throwing knives was shown to all, the other tributes would avoid going near her platform like the plague, which would be unfortunate because half the reason for choosing this spot was to pick them off like flies. No, in the arena, all they see are the same photographs they showed when they televised the training scores. Simple headshots. But instead of scores they post only district numbers.

The faces of the twelve dead tributes began cycling through and she pulled out a knife ready to etch their districts onto the floor in a list.

1M 
3M
3F
5M
5F
6M
8F
9F
10M
10F
12M
12F

The capitol seal returned with an orchestral flourish. Then the darkness and the silence resumed.

Johanna didn’t stop scratching at the floor.

She started adding their names next to their classifications. 

1M - Jasper
3M - Python
3F - Electra
5M - Pluto
5F - Aurora
6M - Jett
8F - Nettie
9F - Millie
10M - Shank
10F - Furr
12M - Cole
12F - Char

Jasper, the boy whose skull she busted with an axe. It was a good axe as well, perfectly weighted.

Their names had been stripped from them by the capitol but she would do them the service of keeping their names alive.

This arena would undoubtedly make it as a tourist hotspot, and she was eighty percent sure that they would design a lift or a staircase to reach the top of their platform, especially if they left something interesting up there. Therefore, the names of her fellow tributes would live on if only in the memories of the capitol scum that visited the arena.

And when the revolution came, she would make them regret looking at these children like characters in a TV drama.

A shrill scream rang out to their left. 

There was an eternity of silence.

Boom went the cannon.

—

Finnick was sure that his fingernails had ruined the leather armrests of the chair he was given.

None of the mentors leave the lounge for the first twenty four hours unless they were wooing sponsors or both their tributes were dead.

It wasn’t the bloodiest first day in history. Usually the bloodbath would get rid of between eight and ten tributes with more passing overnight from mutts, or exposure or injury. But it was still quite bad.

The game was shaping up to be a quick one. 

Of the twelve tributes remaining, only seven seemed guaranteed to survive the night and they were all allied in two opposing groups. Three guesses on what the game makers were going to be gunning for out of that situation and the first two don’t count.

The career pack were on the ground still, organising the cornucopia, and the other tributes to make it away didn’t seem to have the confidence to break for high ground. 

The mentors for the scattered survivors weren’t looking all that optimistic.

Feller from District Nine was scanning through her tablet favoriting anything she could afford, likely as a final send-off present.

He watched out of the corner of his eye as she selected a small hot cup of soup. Both a liquid and filling. 

At least the kid wouldn’t die with hunger or thirst pains.

The main screen had changed from the career pack to Feller’s tribute, Hash.

The parcel landed on top of him.

The angle switched as he began devouring the food.

Something was moving in the rocks a few meters away from him.

The boy was completely oblivious, thanking his mentor for the food.

His mentor who had buried her face in her armchair and had her hands pressed against her ears.

A snake, double the size it should’ve been with steel grey eyes reared up over the boy’s shoulder.

Feller left the room.

Finnick turned away from the screen.

The boy cried out, there was a ripping sound, a squelch and the voice trailed off with a thud. 

The cannon didn’t go off for another ten minutes.

Ten minutes of bleeding out or burning alive or paralysis or whatever foul concoction the labs bottled up for this year’s games.

He kept his eyes on his screen and his screen only.

It was split since his tributes were no longer together. Reif had hoisted himself about five meters off the ground and half hidden on one of the stone structures in a small crevice. 

Elle was in the cornucopia catching up on sleep. The other three surviving careers were comig up with ideas on what to do next.

Usually, they should’ve been out combing through the arena, cutting down the rest of the tributes by now. But they were two members short already and their strongest, District Two’s boy, had been handicapped already by Johanna Mason.

He checked the scoreboard.

Johanna was in the lead for popularity; she had one direct kill and two injuries/potential kills. If either Reif or Valerius succumbed to their injuries, Johanna Mason would get kill credit.

He didn’t even realise she had been the one to nail Reif in the leg during the bloodbath. He didn’t think that Reif knew either. 

It happened when she was sprinting away. She had two axes in one hand and a knife between her teeth. She almost tripped over Reif and the boy from Eight brawling over one of the largest backpacks, and without even looking at them. Pulled the knife from her teeth and in the same motion, flung it at the pair. She had gained a cut at the edge of her mouth that had only worsened with every grin or giggle she had let out since. Half her chin was still coated in her own dried blood. 

He turned to peer over the back of his chair. 

Burleigh was on watch and it was nearing sunrise. He was scratching a crude map of the arena into the stone marking off crosses where any fires seemed to be glowing. Finnick wondered if it would be used as a hitlist in the morning.

The commotion started.

The screen flickered over to the careers. 

He felt his stomach drop.

Some sort of fox, lion hybrid had stumbled across the careers. 

“Would you look at that! That is a genetically modified Coyote.” Caesar’s voice rang out. “For those of you who figured it out I am happy to confirm that we have four major mutts in circulation in the arena. They will all be hunting in different areas at different times of the day.” 

The screen flickered over to a different camera, another pair of coyotes had cornered the boy from nine, “The coyotes are dawn and dusk hunters, if the tributes can outlast them, they will be recalled when the clock strikes seven.”

“It doesn’t look like Hash is going to be outlasting them.” He wished it was possible to throttle Claudius Templesmith without being executed on the spot.

The screen flicked back to show the girls from four and one both awake, armed and fighting off what looked to be a pack of coyotes. 

Unlike Hash, they could substitute in and out to take rest breaks. Even left-handed, District Two will have taught their kids to be able to get around a blade regardless of circumstance.

Finnick decided to call Mags, he needed a nap.

—

“What’s District 7 like?”

It was early hours of the morning and they’d decided to let Burleigh have an extra hour of sleep since he got the worst shift of watch. The three remaining tributes sat around Johanna’s ‘single use portable stove’ as she heated the three tins for their breakfast.

She had decided that the early morning would be the best time to actually sit and digest food. The gamemakers tend to lay off a little whilst waiting for the announcers to finish up their breaks and the audience numbers to spike up again. The broadcast in the main squarein District Seven doesn’t even stay up for twenty four hours. They shut it off at ten for curfew and put it back on at eight thirty for the ‘overnight catchup’ portion. 

This was the time she was going to use for eating bigger meals, not the packeted stuff she had for on the go. 

Her bag was already packed and on her back, both of the Eleven’s were the same, They were going to have a little look around in an hour or so to see if they could find water. They were running uncomfortably low.

“Well, there's a lot of trees.” Almond ‘Call me Ally’ Williams scowled at the evasive answer.

Johanna caught Taro’s eye and they both smirked. 

She nudged the shorter girl in the ribs. 

“Alright, well there are a lot of trees but when you go ‘round different parts, the trees are different too” Ally looked up still pouting, “Some of the trees are the newer kind, the saplings that were modified by the capitol to grow quicker. Then there are the other types. The trees from before.”

“Before?”

“Well we cut one down a while ago cuz some important bloke paid extra for ‘original grain patterns’ whatever that meant” she made finger quotes, “and when we chopped it down we counted how many rings it got.

“Rings tell us how old the tree is and this tree had enough rings inside ‘er to be at least five hundred. The tree was five times older than Panem.”

The girl's eyes were wide like she couldn’t imagine such a thing, even though they taught about the Dark Days in schools (at least she thought they did, she stopped going when her parents died).

“We have an even older tree who’s supposed to be over a thousand. He’s called Gus.”

“You named a tree Gus” Taro cut in all dry wit and incredulous amusement.

“I didn’t name it!” Johanna cut back grinning, “There’s a super old information stand thingy next to him. You can barely read any of it, the only part legible is the word Gus.”

“What kind of tree is Gus?” 

“He’s a very distinguished larch tree.” she raised her nose and pulled the snootiest Draco Malfoy impression she could, accent and all, just to make the girl giggle.

Taro watched over them amusedly, as they traded turns sticking their noses as high as they could go, Ally trying to mimic her accent through the laughter.

Burleigh woke up when the food was done. 

They ended up with chicken soup, which Johanna wolfed down at the speed of light, tomato pasta and pork and beans, which was split between all three of her allies. Johanna wouldn’t have been able to eat canned pork and beans if she was paid to.

Her head snapped up just as the others finished their portions.

Something was wrong.

She looked around, walking the perimeter of the stone.

Nobody below.

She looked up but wasn’t spotting anything.

She did one more perimeter.

A fucking massive black bear was scaling the side of the mountain. 

It must’ve been hidden under a ledge of some kind the first time she checked.

“PACK UP, NOW!” She roared and she unpinned and folded her tent shut with the sleeping bag still inside, tucking it between her back and her backpack.

“There’s a fucking BEAR and it’s climbing up here like a squirrel up a tree. HAUL ASS BITCHES!”

Burleigh and Taro were fastening their ropes around themselves to mimic her harness, attaching the end to the pin still buried in the floor.

Johanna, in contrast, grabbed Ally under her arms and swung the girl over her backpack. The girl squeaked but got with the program, complying whilst crying silently into Johanna’s hair.

She grabbed the rope already attached to her and threaded it through her belt and then around the girls’ back again for good measure.

She felt like a mother koala. 

She had done training like this when she was too young to work with the planters, running up and down the merchant’s row to get them fresh firewood, with a huge stack of quartered logs piled three times her height and fastened to her back.

This wasn’t so different in theory. 

The girl added to the backpack was a similar weight to what she was hauling on her good days back in the district.

She pulled out her axe. 

Both the boys had started descending when the bear reached the top.

She just had to keep it busy until the boys reached the floor.

She could do that.

Easy.

The first paw scraped over the edge.

It was huge.

Its nails were like razors and they left thick lines in the stone.

Then the second paw joined the first.

Its muzzle peeked over the top. 

Before she could register how sharp its many many teeth were and psych herself out, Johanna charged. 

The axe swung down, slicing into its first paw, crushing half of the bones under it like glass.

It roared.

She raised her arms and roared louder.

The axe came down again.

Over its eye.

It was still holding on.

A cannon fired. Fuck.

Again, the axe came down.

The side of its head caved in.

Again.

Its other paw came straight off at the joint.

Ally, the bloodthirsty little shit, was cheering in her ear, tears forgotten.

She raised her arms again as it threw its head back to roar.

She sliced straight through its neck, drenching her and Ally both in arterial blood.

She watched it fall. 

It tumbled loudly over the edge of the cliff. A dust could rose when it slapped against the ground.

Somebody was shouting and then Ally was shouting back but Johanna didn’t pay any attention.

There were two more bears climbing up after it.

Johanna ran.

She ran straight over to the other side, checked over the edge to find both of the boys on the ground, and then jumped.

—

There was yet another commotion in the Mentors lounge.

Finnick looked around and Chaff, Seeder and Blight bounced up and down, screaming at their screens. 

For some of the oldest mentors in the room they had far too much energy this early in the morning.

The excitement wasn’t unwarranted though.

He watched as the camera rapidly shifted between the second alliance. The boys were lowering themselves down the side of a cliff as fast as they could, burning up the skin on their hands and screaming at each other.

On top of the platform was far more exciting however. 

They watched as Johanna lifted up the smallest girl like she was a net of limp fish and strapped her to her own back.

Then the bear came.

If you could call it a bear.

It had to be crossbred with something.

A hyena.

Caesar announced it to be an enlarged and modified, hyena-black bear crossbreed.

He understood why when the thing roared.

It was less a roar and more a screech.

It was similar to the sound of the tributes who burnt alive a few years back. He briefly wondered if that was purposeful. Then he remembered it was a Plutarch arena so of course he would add throwbacks to some of his more popular arenas over the course of his career.

Johanna roared back.

It was a gutteral sound of rage and grief and frustration and more than that it was loud. So loud that it could be heard clearly when they flipped the perspective back over to the boys, and it was heard in the distance by the group at the cornucopia who had finally cleaned themselves up after fighting off the coyotes.

The camera switched back to Johanna and Almond.

They watched in pindrop silence as she maimed, disfigured and obliterated the bear whilst wearing her ally as an accessory. Not even the announcers dared to make a noise.

That was kinda hot.

The angle of the camera changed again just after they got a closeup of the girls being coated in blood.

Four more bears were scaling the side of the platform.

The angle was changing faster and faster, trying to follow the girls as Johanna ran. 

Halfway across the platform.

Three quarters. 

Johanna skidded to a stop.

An angle from under the ledge of her face peeking over the side.

Her head disappeared over the top for a second but the camera angle stayed the same.

Then they saw her legs and Ally screaming as she jumped over the edge.

The camera changed to one further away (probably built into a different rock formation).

They twisted around so Johanna was facing the rock, axe in hand. 

The rope attached to her harness pulled taut but she was still falling.

Only, she was slowing, bouncing off the side of the rock on the way down.

Almond was still screaming.

The landing when they reached the bottom was still a little rough, the elasticated rope was a bit too long but both of them were in one piece, safe and free from the cliff. 

Johanna unlatched herself, and the moment the rope decompressed back up the giant rock, the room exploded with noise.

Blight had collapsed back in his chair, Seeder had collapsed over him and Chaff was bouncing around the room like he wasn't pushing 50.

Johanna didn’t waste a second.

She was back on her feet, pulling the rope off of herself, freeing Almond, and sprinting as fast as she could towards the cornucopia.

The cornucopia where his tributes were.

Fucking hell this was going to be such a short game.

It was only day two.

Chapter Text

Fuck.

Fucking Hell.

Fuck me sideways.

She was running full throttle towards the cornucopia, a little hand clenched in hers as she sped across the dusty floor.

The bears were gaining on them. They were running on all fours and Burleigh had screamed something about them “fuckin’ herdin’ us Jo! Take a hard left, le’s drag th’ careers inta this.”

Johanna took a hard left, leaping over The boy from district two who had just sat upright in response to the commotion.

She half threw, half guided Ally into the back of the cornucopia, pulling a hunting knife off the wall that looked light enough for her to be able to hold. 

She threw her backpack down next to her. 

She spun around when Burleigh started screaming, axe raised, and joined the fray.

Everyone out front was arguing with each other whilst the pack of bears closed in.

Johanna launched herself over Burleigh’s shoulder where he was knelt on the ground catching his breath, with the sole of her foot, axe swinging down harder than Johanna herself was falling.

The head rolled about three meters before it stopped. 

Johanna didn’t stop.

Valerius seemed to have gotten with the picture and Taro was half guiding half dragging Burleigh into the cornucopia to join Ally and Elle. The boy from Two had a full length sword in his left hand and a shield in his right, the arm she injured. 

She caught his eye as she pivoted very obviously to the bear on the left.

His eyes widened but he caught on, turning to the bear on the right.

Johanna was sure that her axe would’ve been blunted by now if it wasn’t capitol-made.

Down she swung, her axe lodged into a furry shoulder.

She jumped up, using the handle for leverage, kicking off the chest of the bear and sliding the axe out of the wound.

She regained her balance, stumbling slightly to the left as the bear turned its frothing maw on her, raised her axe again and swung back down into the same shoulder.

Crunch.

The bone shattered, the tendons severed, the muscles snapped.

The arm of the beast fell limply to the ground, huge nails embedded into the floor.

For a moment the world fell silent. Like nothing was real and she was back in Seven cuddling her chickens or snuggled up in bed, laptop open, hot chocolate ready watching back lectures that she had already been to in person the day before.

Then the world sped up again. 

Taro and Gloria had joined them and were ganging up on the third bear.

Johanna’s bear roared, spittle foamed and flying everywhere, raging and unbalanced by its missing limb.

Johanna watched as it crashed back down to the earth, bleeding unnaturally sluggish, rattling the floor beneath her feet.

She raised her arms.

Briefly she wondered how toned her arm muscles would be at the end of the games.

She swung down.

Boom went the cannon.

The bear’s jaw cracked off its hinge, teeth flying everywhere, one catching her just under the eye.

Another lodging itself into the ground an inch from her foot.

The bear still wasn’t dead. 

Johanna swung upwards this time. 

She used far more force than she had done previously and her muscles screamed in protest but the adrenaline was hitting perfectly and her vision had tinted red. 

The axe crashed through the skull of the bear, cleaving it in half, leaving shards of it’s skeleton scattered in front of her.

The world was quiet. 

Then the cannons blasted.

Boom.

Boom.

She locked eyes with Taro, Gloria and Valour. All four of them darted back to the cornucopia, hostilities forgotten. 

It was silent.

The kind of silence that lingered.

She pushed past the boys.

There was blood everywhere.

Ally was on the ground under Elle, Burleigh propped up against the wall to the side.

She dragged Elle’s body up and passed her over to Gloria.

Taro had taken Ally in his arms and Johanna crawled through the blood over to Burleigh.

He was still breathing.

The third cannon wasn’t for him.

“Burleigh? How you doin’ man?”

He let out a wet gasp and flickered his eyes down to his stomach where his hand was held over a patch of blood that looked slightly darker than the rest of the blood that was literally everywhere.

“Shit.”

She didn’t dare let him lift his arm, instead she added her own on top to keep up the pressure. 

“Fuck, I don’t think I can fix this.”

His head thunked against the wall in the approximation of a nod.

She panicked. 

She knew he was dying but she didn’t want his family to have to see it. She didn’t want the capitol to be able to watch it or keep it as an ‘emotional moment’ video. 

So she did the only thing she could think of.

“You’re headed for heaven,
the sweet old Hereafter"

Her voice was rough and unpracticed but she found the tune of the song quickly and powered through her dry throat.

"And I’ve got one foot in the door
But before I can fly up,
I’ve loose ends to tie up
Right here, in the old therebefore.”

—

The moment the younger kids were left alone in the cornucopia, Finnick knew it was gonna be bad.

The kids could all hear the pounding of feet and the scrape of claws and they were terrified, but the scene outside was captivating in its brutality.

It all shifted the moment Gloria screamed.

She’d been slashed across the cheek by one of the mutts and Elle had already been freaked out since Johanna came rushing in, barely recognisable under all the blood. 

She heard the scream and Finnick swore as her eyes grew wide and her pupils shrunk to pinpricks. 

He watched, dread festering in his gut, as she reached over to snatch a spear off the wall. A spear he knew she could use in her sleep, and she spun around crazed.

Her eyes roved unseeing until the boy from Seven made a move to stand between her and the girl from Eleven.

A few people had moved to stand behind him when they realised the fight with the mutts wasn’t the only action taking place at that moment.

He spared a glance for the big screen to watch Eleven’s male tribute bodily slam Valour out of the way of a swipe that would’ve decapitated him.

Then the littlest tribute sniffled.

His head snapped back to his screen. 

What happened next could only be described as a trainwreck.

Elle lunged for Burleigh, practically foaming at the mouth.

Eleven tackled him out of the way and took a spear to the leg in the struggle. 

Eleven had managed to pull out a huge hunting knife in time to have Elle impale herself on it using her own momentum. 

Elle pulled the spear out and the girl began bleeding far too quickly. It was a slice of her femoral artery she staggered and went down in a heap where she stood. The blood wasn't just flowing out of the wound, it was spraying, coating everything.

She would be dead in minutes.

Elle spun around clumsy on her feet but managed to bury her spear in the stomach of male Seven before collapsing sideways onto Eleven's lifeless form. 

Male seven had only just staggered over and slid down the wall when the cannons blasted.

—

“And I’ll be along when I’ve finished my song”

Finnick winced slightly as Mags grabbed his arm in a grip close to bruising.

“When i’ve shut down the band
When I’ve played out my hand”

Her hand was clasped over her mouth but her eyes were burning.

He looked around.

The only other person who was watching it with such a focus was Haymitch.

He’d put down his glass and had a hand over his mouth like he was trying not to puke.

“Right here in the old therebefore 
When nothing is left anymore”

They watched as the kid she was singing too relaxed against the wall. The monitor with his heartbeat slowing drastically. He wondered why Mags looked so triumphant. She only ever got that look when tributes did something blatantly rebellious but the screen wasn’t cutting off.

The mentors stood in quiet solidarity as the girl finished up her song. 

The kid died a few moments before it ended but she was still holding firm to his wound. 

The other three tributes left alive were slowly and carefully pulling the girls out into the open so they could be picked up by the hovercrafts.

Boom.

The cannon went off.

The camera switched back when Taro went back inside. 

Mason was still pressing down on the entry wound. Still singing.

—

She felt his hands wrap around her waist a few moments after she ended the song.

He was saying something but it was wasted on her.

She couldn’t hear a word of it.

He hoisted her off of Burleigh but all she could see was his dad’s face in the streets after Burleigh had traded her a picture and the buttons off his shirt for food to put on the table. How grateful he looked. She could feel the press of his hand on her head as he crouched down to tell her she would be welcome in his home whenever and that he was sorry to not have more to offer her. 

She went numb.

She was going home and she would treat his whole family to steak or lobster or something else that was notoriously a bitch to have sent to Seven.

But to go home, she needed to be the last one standing.

Taro returned without Burleigh’s body, she could only assume he’d been left outside.

They’ll want them to clear out now. So they can collect the bodies without risking issues with tributes trying to escape or ruining machinery. And there’s nothing to stay for, not really. They left the bloody spear in a corner in the mixed puddle of children’s blood. 

She caught Taro’s eye.

He nodded and the pair silently gathered their supplies together, Johanna made sure to snatch extra food and a few one-use stoves to shove into her bag. 

She pulled off her jacket and wiped her axe down on her vest. 

She took the vest off as well. 

She was left in the tight long sleeved top that left nothing to the imagination and ruined leggings. 

At least she wasn’t leaving a trail of flaky blood behind her anymore. 

She left all her crap in a pile and set off; Taro on her tail.

The other two were too busy poking at a dead bear and whispering to each other to realise they were two of the last five left alive.

They walked for about ten minutes before Johanna paused.

She divided her supplies into two piles and watched as Taro did the same. 

They swapped a pile each and repacked their bags.

“See you in the final two?” She couldn't help but ask.

He nodded and turned to leave, only to pause a little ways away and turn back.

Before she could say anything, he was in front of her, scooping her up in a hug like she wasn’t only a few inches shorter than him.

He said nothing but she could feel her hair getting damp and she could at least offer him some privacy from the cameras to grieve in peace. 

She wrapped her arms around him, axe left by her feet, and squeezed back just as tightly.

It took a little while but he did eventually pull away, face clear if not for the puffiness around his eyes. 

“Final two.”

He echoed back, nodding, turning around and walking away, back in the direction that they came from.

Johanna took the opportunity to go exploring. 

She hadn’t actually seen much of the area and whilst conserving energy was probably a good idea, she didn’t want to sit on her arse with nothing to occupy her time other than her thoughts.

So she climbed.

She didn’t bother setting up any rope or pins for the way up, the adrenaline of every near fall emptied her mind further. 

It was an honest shame that the arena was designed for a death tournament because the view from the top of the rocks were lovely. 

There were small groups of cacti that she was sure she could've used as a water source if she became desperate enough, and wildflowers dotted in clumps at the bottoms of certain formations.

At one point she was sure she saw fresh tracks of where another tribute had been. 

She turned off slightly more sharply to avoid running into them.

She didn’t stop moving until nightfall.

She had done a full loop of the arena by the time the sun started setting and when it did she went straight back up the tallest rock in the arena. The same one she chose the day before (it had only been a day and twenty kids were dead). 

She scaled it more efficiently than she had the first time and pulled her safety cord back onto the platform, reclipping it to her belt. 

She finally received her first sponsored gift.

Five litre bottles of water and an inflatable pool with a handheld pump.

Holy shit, Blight was telling her to have a fucking bath.

She set her tent up, and started her portable stovetop and set herself up with two servings of canned macaroni cheese whilst she blew up the stupid pool.

She stripped down to her underwear, well aware that she was being live streamed across the country but her clothes were stinky and sweaty and her skin felt awful.

She only used about one and a half litres washing herself before she got out of the water. She then set about cleaning her clothes in the leftover oink water as best as she could, rinsing them out with the final half-litre left in the bottle before she made a really shit drying line with her axe (slammed into the ground upside down) and a thinner rope from her collection tied between the handle of the axe and the top of her tent. 

She ate her dinner whilst curled up inside her sleeping bag, watching the stars and the fucking death broadcast.

She scratched their names and districts into the floor again, a meter away from the first list 

4F - Oceanelle ‘Elle’
6F - Nairobi
7M - Burleigh Nairn
8M - Tweed
11F - Almond ‘Ally’ Williams

The only ones left alive were Johanna, Taro, Valerius, Gloria and the little hermit crab from Four who hadn’t shown his face since the cornucopia. 

The games would end tomorrow.

She would make sure of it. 

Boom.

The cannon blasted.

Chapter Text

Johanna stayed up an extra hour just scanning over the edge as though she would be able to see anything in the dark from such a distance before she finally surrendered to her bed.

She woke with the sun and immediately started on breakfast, not willing to risk a slow morning leading to the bears part two.

Her clothes were still a little damp but she was relieved to see how much better they smelled than they did the day before.

She wolfed down her packets of dried meat and had a half litre of water before sorting herself out. 

She kept her harness with her, along with the knife strap around her leg, she ditched the backpack and poured some of her water into the smaller bottle she could fit into one of her pockets. 

She clipped two skeins of rope to her belt and rummaged through her backpack.

She had only one hunting knife left so she slotted it into her second pocket alongside her medkit.

Her arms were free of everything except her axe, which she used her washingline rope to create a harness for so it was strapped to her back. 

She was going hunting.

She retraced her steps from the day before.

A spot of blood covered in a thin layer of dust, a stone that shifted revealing the far less natural looking ground underneath, a discarded scrap of fabric from the vests they were given.

She kept walking.

The trail led her around for about a half hour, at some point the kid had pulled themselves up and behind a super convenient crevice that she wouldn’t have even noticed if not for the glint of metal of a tiny carabiner. She was pretty sure she saw one similar that was connected to the straps of Burleigh’s small backpack. 

She scoffed to herself as she muffled her footsteps out of habit. 

She has absolutely nothing to be scared of, who’s left?

District Two? A girl with hair braided long enough to hang herself with and a boy who can’t use his dominant arm?

District Four who clammed up and hid like a little mole the whole game?

Taro?

Yeah, actually. 

Taro was kinda scary.

Having him as an ally and watching him accidentally snort soup out his nose after eating too quickly really desensitized her to how fucking jacked he was.

He was almost six feet and a wall of pure muscle, easily the tallest tribute in the games even if the Boys from One, Two and Four had more food on the table.

His biceps were the size of her head. 

Her thighs were in a similar state but it was a lot easier to break somebody’s neck with your arms than your legs. 

She had an axe, but she watched Taro grab a sword, so not only did he have height on her, he also had reach and a longer weapon.

Would she be able to throw her axe at him without subconsciously missing due to not actually wanting him dead?

Shit.

She couldn’t trust herself to use her axe at range.

Fucking hell.

She was so caught in her head that she almost missed the inhalation of air coming from her right.

But she didn’t.

She stopped dead still in the middle of a small clearing.

Someone was breathing to her right, not breathing, hyperventilating.

—

Finnick watched in resigned awe as Mason’ head snapped to the side like a shark smelling blood.

Her whole body shifted. 

It was obvious now where it wasn’t before that Johanna was lost in her head, and had been since she woke up that morning.

Because now her eyes were sharp.

She looked present in her body like she hadn’t done in over sixteen hours. 

He didn’t know if it would be an advantage or a disadvantage for his only living tribute, but based on the way that Seven had clipped her axe to her back with a harness he didn’t even realise she had, this was probably the worse of the two Johanna Mason’s to deal with. 

She pulled out the throwing knives.

“Good.”

Finnick turned around and slammed into Mag’s chest almost frothing as Blight commented to Seeder, 

“She’s conserving energy, it’ll probably come down to our two tributes so she’ll need it.” 

Seeder was nodding along.

Finnick spun back around fuming. They had counted Reif out immediately.

Without his consent, his eyes drifted to the statistics chart.

Reif was fourth in every module except initial popularity.

He had the least new sponsors, the least kills, the least screen time, the least odds for winning.

And most importantly, he had the eyes of the girl who was the second currently favoured to win the games pinned on him like a bloodhound.

Reif carefully, quietly, removed his hands from his mouth. By the time they touched the weapon nearest to him, the hunting knife that Johanna threw at him on day one, he was already dead.

She made it quick and she made it as painless as she could.

Two knives were thrown one after the other. 

One went straight through his eyeball, bursting it around the knife and he seemed to drop immediately from the shock.

The second knife found the carotid artery in his neck.

It took thirty seconds of waiting.

Boom.

Finnick couldn’t even find it in himself to be mad. That was one of the easiest deaths that he had seen in a while. 

The careers had never killed as quickly as that. 

Especially not in these games when it took seven hours for the careers to clear out and allow the capitol to pull the many mangled corpses from the bloodbath.

The only death that came quicker in this game was District One’s Jasper whose monitor just stopped all at once as Johanna sprinted by.

None of his kills had been anywhere near so clean. Which was arguably his second biggest regret, right after winning the Hunger Games.

His third regret was coincidentally also winning the Hunger Games, but for a different reason.

He wondered for a moment if the relief he was feeling made him a horrible person. Relieved that Reif wouldn't be a newer younger Finnick.  

There really are no victors in the Hunger Games.

—

She grabbed her hunting knife back from the kid only to find her second axe whilst looting his little hideout.

The one that she threw in the bloodbath.

She had just assumed that it went up in the claw with Jasper’s body.

She wiped it down absently. It was still crusted over with someone's blood. 

She really hoped it wasn’t Jasper’s blood after all this time. 

It looked like it could’ve been old enough but Johanna had never let her hunting knives stay dirty long enough to know for sure.

Don’t think about it.

Don’t think.

There was a cannon last night.

That’s two down.

Two left.

Johanna Mason, Taro Yamaska, Velerius Cadeyrn, Gloria Fionnlagh.

One of them was already dead.

Another two would be soon.

She picked the boy up bridal style and moved him out into the open. There was a chest height flat rock about a five minute walk away so she gathered - momentarily laying him down with his head in her lap, gathered her belongings and strapped both axes to her back.

She made the walk in seven minutes.

She removed the knife, used a small amount of her water and a scrap of fabric saved from her vest to clean up his face for his family. 

Once done, she started drawing.

She was never a particularly good artist. But she had a stable hand and an image in mind. She scraped one of the smaller stones she’d found against the flat surface of rock, creating thick scratches of white under her focussed gaze.

Broad strokes followed by thinner shorter flicks of her wrist. 

Rounded movements repeated until her wrist felt like it could fall off. 

Reif’s body lay under the afternoon sun, angel wings at his back and a sea of ocean animals at his feet and around his legs.

She had heard once in a previous game, years ago at this point, that instead of landlocked graves, people of District Four send their deceased out to sea on small wooden rafts so that they may be free in death.

Reif’s district deserved that freedom even if she had to kill him in order to put herself in a place where she could help them.

His sacrifice would not be for nothing.

She would make it worth it.

She had to.

—

The sun was going down when the cannon boomed again.

Two left.

Her and somebody else.

She altered course immediately.

If it was Valerius, then he would probably retreat to the cornucopia. It was all he really knew of the arena. 

If it was Taro, then he would be at their campsite on top of the rock. 

Both were near enough to each other that she could walk in the general direction of both and probably come across her final competitor.

So she walked. 

She made many small stops on the way.

To urinate, to hydrate, to gather a few bundles of a plant she recognised, to eat, to hydrate again, to make a paste to lather onto her clean axe, to stretch, to warm up, to have her final swig of water.

She was ready.

Their rock was in sight, the cornucopia was just around the next bend. 

She wasn’t ready.

Fucking hell she was so unready it wasn’t even funny.

She had to be.

She kept walking.

She turned the corner.

Taro.

Of course it was Taro.

He had promised the final two after all.

He stood with his back to her, watching the cornucopia, flexing his fingers over and over and over.

She grabbed the dirtier axe off her back and let it drag along the floor.

He turned towards her slowly.

“Hey Jo.”

“Hey Taro.”

“Final two, huh. We did it.”

It came out flat and almost wry.

Johanna found herself smirking.

“Well we did say that we would.”

He smirked back.

“Damn right we did, bet them fuckers back home would never believe this shit.”

“My district is probably screamin’ at me right now to throw my axe through your skull.”

His smirk twitched into a full grin. 

“My cousins are probably doin’ the same. How about this then? Whichever one of us come outta this livin’ has to donate some winnings to the other person’s family.”

Johanna paused for a second.

In the movies, she was pretty sure that Katniss and Peeta did that for Rue, but she was also sure they were threatened or punished for it somehow. Except, it was Taro who was announcing the idea, whilst inside the games, being broadcasted across Panem. So they couldn’t be punished if the public supported the idea.

“You know what? Yeah, let’s do that then.”

Johanna dropped her belt and her bag to the side, hefting her axes and double checking that her knife holster was still secured. 

Taro’s bag was also chucked a few meters away and the rope on his chest was undone and his sword retrieved from the makeshift sheathe.

They stared each other down.

“How do you wanna start?” Johanna asked, still grinning back at him.

“Well if we did ten paces and turn like they did in ‘ye oldern days’ you’d have my ass on a platter with that aim o’ yours” He started, “So we should probably just count down from three or somethin’”

Johanna had an idea, and Taro caught it if the little ‘continue’ chin tilt was anything to go by.

“What if we asked the gamemakers to give us a countdown like in the start of the games?”

He tilted his head to the side.

“Ya know, tha’ could work. Where do we stand tho?”

She scanned the area for a moment.

“Podiums?” 

He looked around. Nodding.

Johanna turned her back on him and swung over to her starting podium. 

When she turned back around, Taro was on his.

There were two empty podiums between them, Char and Reif. they had a flat stretch of land separating them.

They both jumped as the full sixty second countdown started.

“What do you wanna bet that the landmines are active?” She yelled over at him.

He laughed loudly, “No bet! Those crazy bastards designing this shit would absolutely pull that on us!”

She laughed too.

It was freeing in a way, that they were both going into this clear headed with no real deceit.

She grabbed her axe closer down the handle to make sure that she could run with it easier.

Thirty seconds.

“Thanks by the way!” He shouted over.

“Huh?”

“I saw you go back to our camp! You added their names to the rock, didn’t you? I’ll make sure to add yours at the end of this!”

She couldn’t keep in the derisive snort

“You wish! Your lanky arse could barely climb that rock yourself, how the hell are you even gonna get up there safely without me?”

He nodded towards her discarded stuff.

“I’ll use the stupid extra belt that I know you kept in your bag you stingy bitch!”

“You can’t call me stingy when your fat ass ate all my damn food!”

His laugh boomed across the clearing.

Five seconds.

They both startled.

The announcer seemed to make a point of speaking the number out loud. Although, without his interruption, they probably wouldn’t have noticed the timer at all.

Three

Two.

One.

Johanna launched.

Zero.

—

Johanna came at him like a tempest.

That was the only way he could describe it.

One of her axes had been thrown aside, and she was running at him so fast he could’ve sworn she was some kind of animal.

He lifted his sword and parried.

He played this game with his older brothers a lot. 

They would grab the old tools from dad’s shed and play fight like they saw people doing in the games. They would come back into the house starving and exhausted but grinning like fools.

They were fools.

He sliced horizontal. She ducked underneath his arm.

Like most district kids who were raised ignorant, raised blissfully unaware of the teeth behind the smile of their president, they idolised the games. 

It was easier to raise the kids that way in Eleven. It kept the streets lighter, the people happier, if they saw the kids happy. They believed that what they were doing was worth it if the kids were gonna be okay at the end of the day.

But the kids weren’t okay. 

Not once they hit reaping age and they saw people months or years older or younger than them being shipped off to die in order to keep them down, to keep them muzzled and compliant. 

He scrambled out of the way of a downwards swing of her axe, a swing that crushed those mutts the day before. Had it only been a day?

As long as the President had their children, he had their very reluctant cooperation.

But Eleven was built on slaves.

Literally. 

District Eleven was built on stories weaved through words whilst their elders braided seeds into their hair. They were raised on images of a home, a place so expansive and wide that it used to be called a continent. Raised on tails of animals that hunted each other and princesses and warriors who made friends with those animals. Who fought with the animals and healed with the animals. The lightest skin ever seen around eleven were from the people who were shipped in from two as peacekeepers or their mayor. They were the ones with the power. But they all knew that the whites in their district were outnumbered. 

He rolled as she flung a knife from her thigh right where his head would have been.

They were waiting for the rest of the districts to realise that their whites were also outnumbered. Everywhere except maybe Twelve. But Twelve was a camp of rebels. Every family in twelve were married into or born of rebels. It’s why they were beaten down so harshly, it’s why their people were made to suffer. They weren’t just the ‘example district’ they were a district that his mama called ‘Australia’. Mama said that criminals were shipped off to Australia by the people that traded their great-however many great-grandparents to the people of Pre-Panem as slaves in the first place. Twelve were their President’s Australia.

He jolted back to his feet and nicked Jo across the thigh, cutting through the cord of her thigh holster down to her flesh.

Johanna looked like she was also born of rebels. 

She should’ve been from Twelve.

Except she wasn’t, she was smart. So it wasn’t too far a stretch to believe her ancestors were smart too. Biding their time just like Eleven was for somebody just like Johanna to come along to help.

That’s all Johanna had done since the games began.

She helped and helped and helped even when they drained her food supplies or her water or her patience and goodwill. She never ran out of kindness. 

She was rude and blunt and could curse with the best of ‘em. But Johanna Mason was kind.

He wanted her to win. 

But he also wanted to see his mama again.

Johanna would’ve done great in Eleven, she would’ve been great for Eleven, but his desire to go home outstripped his love for his people. Because Taro was selfish. He wanted to make at least an impression, he wanted to be remembered if he could not be returned to his ma. And Johanna was not going to let him go home to his ma. She was too kind for that.

He didn’t know the details behind why she felt that winning would be a punishment but he could see the reluctance in every line of her body, on every crease of her face. 

And most damningly of all, in the hand on her axe. 

She hadn’t thrown it. 

He knew that she could’ve. 

But it was clasped in her white-knuckled grip, swinging a fraction slower than he remembered from her. 

Johanna was just so kind.

And Taro was selfish. 

So he let her be kind even though he didn’t understand it. 

He smiled as the axe finally caught him between the ribs. 

She looked devastated but the line of her shoulders sagged with relief, she wasn’t happy to be a victor, she was relieved that he wouldn’t be one.

It didn’t even hurt. 

He looked down. 

The axe was covered in a white milky surface, bits of black were crushed into the mixture.

His head swam, but it wasn’t from blood loss.

He staggered to his knees and Johanna was suddenly there, laying him down and pillowed his head in her lap. 

“I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it’s opium.”

He hadn’t heard of it and it probably showed on his face.

“I stumbled across some poppies earlier, they have this substance in them,” she lifted the bloody axe into his line of sight so that he could see the white liquid, “and it’s basically a narcotic, it gets rid of pain and relaxes the body. I figured you deserved at least that much.”

He felt his smile tug back onto his lips. Damn woman, a kind damned woman.

“Fuck Jo, you didn’t believe you were gonna lose for a second, huh?” He choked out a laugh, “You’re such a bitch, but it’s working in my favour right now so I'm gonna let it slide. Just this once.”

He hadn’t ever felt so free since he had been six and didn’t yet know what the Hunger Games actually was.

He felt peaceful. 

Jo sat above him, tears streaming down her cheeks as she sang him to sleep. 

Sleep came quietly.

Chapter Text

She ran as soon as she finished her bastardized rendition of ‘Just Around The Riverbend’ from Pocahontas of all things. It didn’t quite fit the situation, but she remembered jumping around the living room with her nana singing the song at the top of her lungs back down in Cornwall when everything was peaceful and they were free. She’s sure the neighbours had learnt all the lyrics by the time she turned thirteen. 

For some reason that was the memory that came to her in Taro’s last moments.

So she sang, and sang and trailed off into ‘Colours of the Wind’ and then finally into a hastily patched together and not altogether correct version of ‘Remember You’ from Adventure Time. Somewhere between the axe being stuck between his ribs and laying him down like she was putting him down for a nap, her brain had retreated back to that of a twelve year old. 

The cannon hadn’t gone off yet, but she punctured his lung so it was bound to be soon. 

She ran straight at the wall. 

No axe, no real weapon, just a blunted, scratched up knife between her teeth and her two bare hands.

She scaled the hard surface like she had been doing it for years. 

She had learnt this rock the same way she had learnt the pattern of the scars on the back of her hand.

The edges and rivets moulded themselves to her hand as she found her balance. 

She stood at the top in silence for a moment.

The cannon blasted.

The congratulations announcement and the music blasted through the arena. 

She was running out of time.

She grabbed her knife, fell to her knees and scratched in far bigger writing, right in the center of the stone.

She wrote their full fucking names.

1F - Gloria Fionnlagh
2M - Valerius Cadeyrn
4M - Reif Locke

Her head snapped up at the chiming of a sponsor gift. 

It landed just in front of her hand.

A can of spray paint in bright silver and a small pot of gold paint.

She looked between the two and made her decision.

She opened the pot of gold and then finally in large bold strokes of the brush,

11M - Taro Yamaska

And underneath, no district, no gender.

Silver spray paint.

Johanna Mason.

What a thing to spend her sponsor donations on.

She won.

A hovercraft flew down overhead.

A ladder dropped down with it.

She put her hand on it and was frozen into place.

Fuck it was really happening. 

She won. 

She actually won.

She cackled like a raving harpy by the time they had her hauled into the aircraft. Apparently she was not supposed to be able to laugh or move anything at all. But she was doing it. 

She got one last look at those slightly off-putting surgically symmetrical faces before the injection in her arm had her out cold.

—

She came to in the prep room.

Her team was silent.

Tish however, was furious. 

Her eyes kept scanning up and down Johanna’s body, following lines Johanna could not see.

Something was wrong.

The Doctors were supposed to fix her arm, where Taro nicked her, and her hands from all the oozing calluses and the climbing. And they had, she noted, when she lifted them up to her eyes.

But whatever they did, affected her whole body.

Did she have some underlying condition? Did her appendix burst? 

She was helped to her feet but she couldn’t feel her legs, the whole world was wobbly like it was made of jelly.

She was drugged to the gills.

What?

She wasn’t in enough pain to warrant this.

The dress went on. Her design, a dress made of layers of chiton, draped artfully under a golden corset and a huge gold cloak. The birds she had designed were settled on her shoulders to pin the coak in place. They were heavier than she expected.

The boys were still holding her upright. Without them she was sure she would've been reduced to a puddle on the floor.

She tried to move her mouth to talk but the muscles didn’t even twitch.

She was undressed soon after, pins and adjustments were marked out or put into place.

She was asleep again before they settled her in the padded wheelchair.

—

She slept in fits and starts. 

Taro’s name on her lips and his blood in her throat each time she woke.

Blight looked more and more pitying every time he was sent off by Claudette (a surprisingly good nursemaid) for a fresh glass of water.

Claudette was also radiating a subtle aura of confused, almost directionless upset.

Johanna was his first victor.

And for all that he’d been working with 7 for the last decade, he had never had to see the effects of pulling a name out of the bowl personally.

But he pulled out Johanna’s name with his own hand two weeks ago, and now, with the same hand, he was drying her eyes and lifting her head to help her drink.

She is the fruits of his labour, intentionally or otherwise.

She couldn’t think on it anymore as she was pulled under by her pounding head and swimming vision.

She woke up three more times that night.

—

They woke her properly late into the morning, just after what could’ve been considered a reasonable brunch hour. 

She was fed and dressed and shuffled into the lift by the prep team who were studiously avoiding her gaze. It would have been impressive how many distractions they found to avoid so much as looking at her for longer than a few seconds at a time if it wasn’t infuriating.

She had her victory interview in three hours and Sparrow had made the executive decision to not talk about whatever the problem was until after the interviews were done. They were going to be harrowing enough already.

Her center of balance was off.

It wasn’t too noticeable but she was definitely bumping into shit, consistently.

Sparrow wasn’t having it so she had to relearn how to walk but in six inch heels this time and not the ones half that height from the first interview.

She felt like a newborn fawn.

Just as she was getting the hang of walking ten steps without her ankle buckling underneath her, Blight pulled her aside.

Blight pursed his lips. “Look, there’s an issue with the interview,” he says. “You are a particular type of personality that isnt encouraged in victors. They want your interview to go a very specific way, Johanna.”

Johanna knew Blight was trying to tell her something, but she was missing far too many pieces to even begin to put it together. “What do you mean?”

Blight stared over her head, preparing himself for whatever he was about to say. “There were a lot of things that were… off about this year’s games,” he starts. “They want you to be very careful about how you talk about them in this interview. They don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea.”

“What idea?”

“The poppies, Johanna”

Her stomach dropped but she was lost. They put the poppies in the damn arena. They had to know that it was an option. It wasn’t even the correct species of poppy for the environment so she assumed it was intentional. They didn’t even use desert poppies - Eschscholzia glyptosperma - they used opium poppies - Papaver somniferum. It would never have been an option otherwise.

Her confusion must’ve shown on her face because Blight continued. “Those bear mutts you encountered, they never even managed to hurt you, there was a second species of mutt designed for people at high vantage points, modified nocturnal vultures. They refused to go near you - that’s a major failing on the scientists' part, and the general public cannot know that. And the poppies weren’t supposed to be used to ease another tributes pain, they were there to drug unsuspecting tributes and fuck over their chances. You have to be careful about how you talk about this, don’t imply anything in your interview that might even hint towards knowing what you were doing. They managed to mute your little explanation to Eleven so don’t even allude to knowing what you were doing.”

“Look at me,” Blight held her chin, tilting her head to face him from where she had been scowling furiously out the window. “This interview has to go well - no double meanings, no hints - I’m serious, okay? We both know that you’re decent with words, you do not want to mess around with this.”

Johanna was used to being called stupid, she hadn’t gone to school after turning eight so her district assumed that she had to be. But she could see the bigger picture, and Blight was absolutely hinting at the long game. She knew what he was trying to say; she remembers watching the lashes from the Peacekeepers coming down on her neighbour when he dared to make a joke at Snow’s expense too close to a capitolite on a wilderness retreat. 

Forget other people, if she messes up this interview, she’ll be the one who needs to go to the hospital. And that’s not even including the possibility that they might do something to her whole district if they think it’ll hurt her.

Apathetic. 

She needed to be apathetic, charming but in a shallow way.

She need’s to be Finnick Odair but with sharp smiles and sharper teeth. He’s made himself marketable - likely in a bid to have his precious people remain alive - she will not do that. He’s gone to one extreme with appeasing the public, she will go the other.

Malicious compliance was her bread and butter.

Snow wants her to be pretty for his clients. She would be female attraction turned up to the nth degree, she would make herself lethal and untouchable. Like the geisha of her old world.

It was going to be a political minefield but if she could manage this, she could set herself up in a prime fucking position for the rebellion. If the attention stayed on her, then it would stay off the other people in her district. She could coordinate evacuations in flower metaphors and banal commentary on current fashion trends.

Holy shit that could work. 

She got herself together and plopped herself down as gracefully as she could in front of the large vanity in the prep room.

She met her own eyes in the mirror.

She looked like a doe.

That wouldn’t work.

She pulled out all of the gold pigments, liners, gems, glitters, everything. And then a single pot of black gel liner.

—

Tish was distraught that her hard work had been ignored but Sparrow was looking at her makeup intently, switching out the delicate headpiece for a second one that she had been saving for the victory tour. It was a larger thing, sharper, with huge spikes and thorns and twists that branched out like a halo of roots and branches, it had a cavernous opening at its center where her crown would sit. The headpiece twisted around her face, sprawling under her cheekbone, making it look higher and sharper. She felt like Angelina Jolie in Maleficent.

Tish had stopped complaining once the headpiece was pulled out of its case, and instead started fluttering around with gold leaf, putting pieces on any available skin, over hair nails and down her fingers to look like he had dunked her hands in the stuff.

Upside - it looked great.

Downside -  she had to be handed her water and guided to the straw by a poor avox who just happened to be nearby when they figured out that it was an issue.

Tish called ahead to mention that it meant it would be a touch-free interview. Caesar would have to figure out a different greeting than a handshake or a hug but it was so worth it to look in the mirror and not recognise herself. 

She looked like a deity. A Forest nymph or an omen of death. Persephone reborn.

It was exactly the image she was trying to sell.

After a few more laps of the prep hallway to make her wobbly ankles less baby-cow-esque, and touchups to the oil they’d decided to slather over her visible skin to show off her tanned muscles, they set off for the interview area.

It was packed tighter than the first time. People weren’t sitting, they were standing as though this was Shakespeare’s Globe. Even the balconies looked like they were pushing the weight limits from what she could see from behind the curtain.

A few of the fan-favourite mentors over the years as well as her own were all sat in the semicircle of chairs around the back. Likely there for the audience of fans to pick apart their reactions during the replay.

She was not looking forward to the replay. 

They collapse all the footage into a film exactly three hours long and pick apart every single scene that they decide to show.

It’s required viewing for all of Panem.

The interview is designed to smooth over any rough or controversial moments. The victor is made to explain their actions away in a Capitol Approved manner. She had already been fed lines about the poppy incident saying that she thought it would make it hurt more or that she was using the liquid to clean blood off her blade.

She wasn’t going to use them.

Johanna was the victor of the hunger games but Hanna knew flowers. If she could spin the whole situation into an hour long documentary on Mesa plant life then nobody can tell her that she didn’t try in the interview. In fact, it’ll probably come off as trying too hard or being omniscient of the terrain. 

She squinted in contemplation.

Omniscience.

If she could focus on the arena itself and how she prepared for it rather than commenting on all the death and the rebellious undertone to the whole game - especially with Johanna and her allies - then Snow would have no reason to fault her. 

She would have to make it interesting enough, play up the suspense.

Make it a story that would be played as a preface to the games or layered overtop for the capitol students and the district schools when they study them. Because her game will be studied. She could spin a tale of the metagame. The studying and the analysing and the other factors that go into the game, like a behind the scenes episode.

She knew that she would have loved that if she were reborn into the capitol. 

She could do this.

—

The anthem boomed, followed immediately by arguably the best piece of music in the series, ‘War by the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble’, the interview theme.

A small screen was lit up to her left showing her backlit footage of Ceasar and a detailed scope of the audience.

Caesar greeted the audience over the pounding music. Effortless in a way that indicated years of dedicated practice and experience. The prep team was presented, Tish sat on top of the boy’s shoulders, all three took a remarkably well centered bow as a unit. They’d likely been practicing that for years as well. All of them were aware of the risks, they had been around enough victors - what with seven being in the running for top ten most years - and then Claudette was introduced. 

His hair wasn’t silver any longer, he had managed to find time between helping her prepare and finding his seat to either spray or dye it a sparkling gold. At least he was on theme. Sparrow receives a standing ovation, of course, she was nattering on about her line for the victory tour and the ‘photo opps’ in every district for a new edition of ‘The Capitol Collection’ that Johanna was supposed to feature in.

Blight’s appearance brought a round of exaggerated swooning, mostly from the older crowd, as he gave a pearly white smile and a gentleman’s bow. It was the most he’d contributed to anything for years, he was the first to take his seat in the back semicircle.

Then they go through and introduce the guests for additional tidbits from the mentor’s lounge and comments on behalf of their tributes. Chaff and Seeder were presented first on behalf of Taro and Ally, then Enobaria for Gloria and Brutus for Valerius and finally Finnick for Elle and Reif - one who had more screen time and the other who lasted longer.

“Welcome back to the stage ladies and gentlemen, your victor Johanna Mason of District Seven!”

She felt the platform she was standing on rise and she took her position. Shoulders back, head tilted slightly upwards, eyes forward and hand resting on the prop she insisted on. 

The axe, gold and bedazzled with flowers made of ruby like blood draped over its blade, trailing along the floor after her.

Caesar’s voice rang loud and clear, Johanna took the same path as the first time. 

Long confident steps, cape flowing behind her Snape-style, axe dragging along the stage.

Heel, toe. Heel, toe. Heel, toe.

Her feet clicking against the stage, still audible to her even over the roar of the audience.

She timed it to her heartbeat, willing herself to calm down.

Heel, toe. 

She reached the front of the stage, bypassing Ceasar, who seemed to be expecting it this time as he rose to join her on her walk.

The front few rows screamed. 

The people on the balconies were leaning over the railing.

She took a measured step back as a few people tried to reach out and claw at her dress. 

She mentally apologised to Tish as she grabbed Ceasar’s hand and raised it to the sky.

Fuck that was so loud.

“-ANA MASON!”

And it got louder.

She let the man escort her to her seat, setting the axe down against the armrest, trying to blink through the ringing in her ears.

Caesar cracked a few jokes, and had her stand and twirl to show off the birds pinning up the cloak and the shimmer that fanned out around her in a cloud of gold dust.

Then the video started.

She saw herself on her chariot. They didn’t spend an awful lot of time on her at first, until they noticed that the leaves had started falling. After that point, every camera in the area was on her. Every angle that could feasibly exist was panned through one after another as the leaves fell to reveal the golden underbrush of the forest she was wearing. They paused for a playback of Sparrow’s phone call when she was on the train, followed by a montage of frantic dressmaking, which had apparently been taped, and a few questions were thrown at her style team about the prep for the parade. 

Then they showed the training scores.

It paused over her face with the ten and the film switched over to her skills assessment.

Just as she entered the hall it paused.

“So Johanna,” Caesar started, “None of us have seen this before,” a sly wink was sent at the wailing audience, ”talk us through your thought process.”

“Well,” She started, “I admittedly, spent a lot of time at the survival stations with my little notebook. I had already begun starting a record of what sorts of emphasis was being placed on each station. For example the water station didn’t even have a trainer standing near it, so I assumed it to be obsolete, either we would have too much fresh, clean water or none at all.” The crowd oohed and ahhed appropriately but Caesar’s eyes were glinting with a too-sharp focus.

“The game doesn’t start in the arena,” she decided to add with a little nod in the direction of Plutarch and the gamemakers, “It starts the second your name is pulled from the bowl.” Johanna paused, angling a considering look on the first few rows, “So I played the game.”

She detailed the training hall and the camera switched to a top down view to aid her in pointing things out.

“The climbing wall struck me as odd. Obviously we only see the training hall briefly in moments like these, when a victor references their time practising but those moments are few and far between. I had never so much as heard a whisper of a climbing wall before.” The crowd were on the edge of their seats like they were reading a Sherlock Holmes novel, “And it had four instructors.”

She snuck a glance backwards to find the predatory gazes of all the mentors glued to her, shit she was going to have tough competition next year. 

The audience was getting rowdy with their whispers, even Snow and his granddaughter were angled towards each other eagerly debating the facts presented.

“I spent most of my time at the wall or with the weaponry during my private hours, and so that is what I chose to display.”

The audience cheered as they watched her navigate the stupid training wall with ease. 

She glanced at the clock. 

She had managed to drag that out for fifteen minutes of long pauses and throwing different discarded theories through the air that had the gamemakers jotting down notes. 

A terrifying thought but at least she could use them as thought experiments for future tributes. 

The film started again, this time playing the countdown.

Johanna had spent an hour or so the night before timing her jumps to make sure that she landed 0.1 seconds after the display read zero. It was nerve wracking with the potential of mistiming it but the advantage it gave her was too good to give up. It quite literally forced her out of the mental fugue of trying to figure out her plan by giving her a smaller goal to focus on. 

They watched as she narrated her sprint through the cornucopia and how she started piling things into the already half-stuffed backpack. 

Finnick Odair managed to fit a comment in when she ran past and stabbed Reif in the leg with her thrown blade. Brutus had to make a comment on the District 1 tribute seeing as Gloss and Cashmere weren’t present.

They also watched parts she hadn’t seen. Taro grabbing his sickle thing and his backpack from the opening of the cornucopia, fighting off and putting down both the kids from Five. Ally and Burleigh both running at funny angles to grab smaller packs before latching onto each other like limpets, both shaking visibly and frantically scanning the mess for a sign of either Johanna or Taro. watching them both take gulping breaths of relief as she came bursting out of the bulk of the crowd with wild eyes and a wilder grin, Taro on her heels, matching her step for step.

They watched as she ran with no hesitation at a rock, scaling it as Taro took command of the younger two, fitting them into their makeshift gear. They were a well oiled machine. It was almost difficult to watch how easily they worked together, Johanna taking point and Taro watching their rear like they had done it all their lives.

Then they watched a small clip going over the list of tributes and a few minutes of their banter before it cut to the bears surrounding them and crawling up the side, they cut back to Johanna bolting upright, straightening her back with the uncanny sense of unease. The clips cut back and forth between Johanna figuring out what was happening and the bears gaining on them. 

She jumped in her seat as on the screen she yelled out for them to start packing.

She barely remembered any of this. 

Johanna on screen lifted Ally like she weighed nothing at all. The adrenaline must’ve been doing the lord’s work because she would never have been able to pull that off otherwise.

She stopped breathing as she watched herself raise her axe.

It looked so much worse from here. She could see how close the other bears were to overwhelming her at this point. 

The angle switched again to showing the boys (mainly Taro) fighting off a snake that had hidden itself in cracks in the rock. She had no clue that it even happened. 

Burleigh socked it in the face with his fist, splitting his knuckles but giving Taro enough room to slice its head off with his sickle. 

The camera panned back to her as a cannon boomed, a short cut denoting it as the blast for Tweed from District Eight. She watched herself straighten up, her axe shattering the thing’s paw, Ally beaming into her hair, tears still streaming down her face but her eyes were wide with adrenaline induced mania. 

Johanna watched herself scream, a raw guttural sound.

Then she watched herself jump.

It looked far more scary when they didn’t bother to show the footage of her setting up the bungee line.

They watched the sprint to the cornucopia from the perspective of the careers. 

They watched between clips of the older tributes banded together and slaughtered the mutts as the babies of both groups cracked under the mental strain and murdered each other because if they were the only one alive, nobody could hurt them anymore.

She forced herself to watch as she went catatonic over Burleigh, as Taro pulled her off him. And ran his fingers through her hair, drawing her out of the numb nothingness that she had drowned herself in. They skipped over the song she sang and Burleigh’s death in favour of her moment with Taro that she had no recollection of.

She watched as they gathered their things and split off. 

She watched as Taro cut down Gloria and Valerius like they were made of tissue paper.

She watched as Reif almost panicked himself into unconsciousness before she put him out of his misery.

She watched as she reunited with Taro.

She watched them joke and grin at each other like they weren’t about to slaughter each other.

They included the segment about splitting the money with each other’s family. She doubled down when Ceasar asked and appealed to the president for permission. The benevolent nod she recieved felt like led in her stomach. 

Then, in a truly masterful mirror of the start of the games, she watched them start the countdown.

The audience roared with laughter as they screamed lighthearted insults at each other from their pedestals.

She watched herself slide her axe through his stomach.

They didn’t include the moment where she coated the thing in unrefined opium.

She didn’t mention it.

Instead she watched in silence as they overlaid their final conversation with a rough rendition in her scratchy throat of ‘Just around the Riverbend’. Taro’s vitals were on screen. He remained conscious all through the first song and part of the second, ‘Colours of the Wind’. They watched his heartbeat slowing as she scrambled for the words of ‘Remember You’ and she set him down gently, dragging his bag over to use as a pillow. 

Then she watched herself run.

She ran with basically nothing to her name straight at her rock.

They watched the sponsored gift arrive.

She watched herself add the final names of the fallen and then her own as she was announced the winner.

The anthem blared out and President Snow took to the stage with his granddaughter trailing after him bearing a crown on a cushion. 

He smiled down at her with the self-accomplished grace of a white man in a position of unequivocal power. 

She was nothing to this man.

He placed the crown atop her head and shimmied it a little so it affixed to the numerous combs and pins put into position for that very purpose.

Much bowing and cheering followed. She bowed a performer's bow when Caesar Flickerman finally bid the audience good night, reminding them to tune in tomorrow for the final interviews. As if they had a choice in the matter.

She had an hour to change before the Victor’s banquet began.

She was whisked away by a crowd of mentors and prep team members as they monopolised her exhaustion to deposit her back in the lift.

Two more events and they would finally send her home.

A banquet and a personal interview.

One meal and party and one more conversation with Ceasar.

Then she would be on a train homeward bound and would be able to assess the damage done over the course of her games.

She could do this.

Chapter Text

She finally gotten set up, clad in only panties in front of a full-length mirror with her prep team when she realised what the issue was.

They’d given her surgery.

Cosmetic surgery.

She had only vaguely heard of half of the things she was reading in the doctor's report, it was more like an itemised list of both technical and colloquial terms. 

The least intrusive of which was the full body polish.

Every scar, every flaw, every freckle had been eradicated. She looked plastic.

Then there were the parts that made her feel dysphoria for the first time in her life.

They had done an abb sketch, a butt lift, veneers - but a fancy capitol version that were either made of bone or mimicked it well enough, a breast lift, something happened where they sharpened her cheekbones to the point where she looked fae even out of makeup, some sort of hair removal procedure that permanently removed her hair from everywhere. She wasn’t as flat as she used to be. She was so proud of how easy it was for her to maneuver her body through small gaps and mold herself into thinner hiding places when she was training. She wouldn’t be able to do that anymore. Her body was no longer built and streamlined only for survival. 

If that wasn’t enough, Blight handed her back the doctor's report, she had gripped it hard enough to risk tearing it, they had done a labiaplasty. 

Apparently her actual body wasn’t the only part of her deemed undesirable. They had decided that her reproductive system wasn’t up to par for their aesthetics.

Blight either didn’t know that the plastic surgery was a part of the proceedings or didn’t fight hard enough against it.

Which one was worse?

Naivety in a world that couldn’t afford that sort of lacking intel or putting minimal effort into such a life-altering issue, a potentially a life-ending issue.

She wanted to claw her skin off.

She wanted to tear open her chest and crawl out of her ribcage.

She didn’t even get time to assimilate the information before they were fighting her into a blessedly high necked dress. It was tight fitting but it covered as much skin as a dress possibly could. The only part of the dress that was open was her back. Her unmarred, untouched, unmolested back. It might just be her new favourite feature.

She couldn’t stop crying.

Her rage had eclipsed into helpless tears.

She could do nothing about it. Not for years yet.

But she would.

The buffet was a blur. 

She smiled and laughed like a barbie doll, allowed herself to be maneuvered and whirled around the room whilst she spat and cursed and hissed within the confines of her mind. She vaguely remembered being intercepted for a few dances by Finnick, Cashmere and Gloss who looked increasingly more plasticine as the night wore on.

All four of them were collectors dolls in cardboard boxes.

Little wind-up dolls sitting on a shelf with a price tag below their feet.

She would not be sold. 

Ollie would understand. If the roles were reversed, she would likely do the same for him. If Snow decided that he was her closest person, despite them only seeing each other maybe once a month at most, and use him to enforce her compliance. She was sure he would understand. Afterall he was raised to lose limbs in place of others. Maybe he could spare a limb for her.

What an awful thought.

Was she awful for thinking it?

Self-preservation to the exclusion of all others was a dangerous thing, but here, in this hellhole she had found herself in, it was likely the only way to escape it with most of her sanity intact. 

The issue about being so self-aware was that Johanna was well aware that if she ended up being sold, she would be dead or mentally ravaged within the year. Sex trafficking would ruin the tenuous hold she had on her mind.

She had to offer something else instead. 

She had to secure herself a stable financial stream for both her district and the President. Multiple methods of financial income would be ideal. 

Fuck, but he might not even bring it up here. She might go back to Seven and find him waiting in her house for her one day. Waltzing into a building that she will never allow to be her safe space and ruining any idea of having something to call hers within this shithole country.

Don’t think about it.

Smile and float around.

She was still on Finnick’s arm.

It had been a while.

Three more songs went by and she was slowly but surely feeling the sensations she had been numb to for, she checked the clock, little under two hours.

Her legs were starting to ache and she was sure she had blisters from the ridiculous shoes.

Her face felt stiff but her smile did not fall. 

They were in the center of the dance floor.

She drifted in a haze of directionless, helpless rage.

—

The next day was no different from the day previous.

She had been bundled off to bed after the prep team undressed her with a palm full of pills and a glass of water.

She woke at all hours of the night screaming out for Taro like she had known him for far longer than barely a few days. His blood was under her nails and between her teeth so she brushed and rinsed them until her prep team dragged her bodily away from the sink. 

They plopped her in front of the mirror again.

She closed her eyes.

She was fed water and protein smoothies through straws as they scrubbed and oiled her the body she was wearing.

The dress was one of the few she left up to Sparrow’s discretion. The theme was locked in though. The dress was basically made of plantlife, which was interesting.

The leaves and the petals were supposed to unfurl under the harsh stage lighting so at least it was interesting. The dress would change over the course of the interview. 

When she opened her eyes again all she could feel was gratitude.

The flowers were an excellent distraction from the new curves of her body, they twisted and curled around her in waves of tiny delicate petals and huge clumps of almost fuzzy looking leaves.

Her muscles were on full display, apparently they were a 'major hit’ with a number of men and women in the capitol who either wanted to emulate the idea of feminine power or wanted her to fuck and dominate them whilst wearing a flouncy skirt. Yes those were in fact the only two options.

Regardless of how uncomfortable the thought made her, she was nevertheless grateful for not being forced to lose them and the capitol not removing them cosmetically. 

She was shuffled off to one of the other tribute floors (12’s penthouse) that had been converted into a set for photographs.

It was very much not the regular agenda post-games but with the information getting out about Johanna’s role in the design of ‘Seven’s Resurgence into the Fashion Sphere’, demand for professional shots of her in Sparrows designs had skyrocketed. 

Apparently they were organising some magazine cover for a transcript of her upcoming interview. As though anyone is even allowed to miss it. 

She kept her eyes forwards and her hands away from her skin. Her steps were measured and careful and she had to take a quick stock of the area before walking to ensure that she wouldn’t bump into anything. 

If she acknowledged the reality of her situation she knew she would try to hurt herself.

Bleeding claw marks down her face wouldn’t photograph well after all.

—

Finnick was sat with Gloss and Cashmere as the three got ready for the ‘final afterparty’.

It only happened on certain years. 

Years like theirs. 

Years where the victor emerges as unmarred by the arena as possible both physically and mentally. 

Years where the victor is to be paraded around to the highest of their sponsors like a slab of meat at the butchers.

They got off lightly the night before. 

It seemed like someone clued the girl in because Mason - regardless of her debatable mental state - kept her smile on and her body moving. She did not stay in one place for too long. She did not talk to any of the guests long enough to express enough interest or disinterest to spark their attention or empty their wallets. She refused to look anybody in the eye.

Not for the first time he wondered what he would’ve done if somebody clued him in after his games. 

His whole family would have died, that’s for certain. 

He would have thrown a fit. 

Fourteen and fresh from the slaughterhouse half-rabid and snarling at his prep team when they tried to touch him. 

He just thought the Capitolites were being eccentric. They were more touchy than the tailors in four and more opaque with their words than the fishwives. 

He thought he would be free to go home and enjoy the riches and the glory he was promised, owed, by his teachers and his District.

Until he received the phone call.

And then the roses.

And he went back to a hotel room that Priscilla, his district escort, had directed him to disinterestedly to find a fifty year old politician wanking obscenely in the bedroom.

He thought he had been given the wrong room key at first.

He went home to Four with bruises wrapped around his wrists and dotted along his collar, any patriotism he had left after being ordered to kill the other tributes - the other children - was stripped away along with his naivety.

Johanna Mason seemed to understand the deal.

He hoped that she would survive it.

He was barely managing to keep his head above water.

—

Johanna sat center stage beneath the spotlight, blinking against the artificial glare, trying with everything she had to stay in the present and not get caught inside her head. The crowd was a mass of glittering teeth and chins tilted too high, Capitolites preening like overfed birds.

The set was a monstrosity of curling vines, ‘to match her dress’ Sparrow had said proudly, as if the choice had been hers. The flowers had unfurled mid-transit, delicate petals catching the breeze of the ventilation fans.

Caesar greeted her with open arms and a blinding smile.

“Johanna Mason!” he beamed, “Our victorious flower from District Seven - and might I say, Panem’s newest fashion icon!”

She forced a smile that bared a little too much teeth to be considered polite. “Thanks,” she said, voice dry as bark. “It’s either that or going back to lumber.”

Laughter, polite and hollow.

He launched into pleasantries, recapping her Games highlights like a greatest hits montage: the axe work, the ambush, the mutts, the bungee rope, the hunt she went on during the third day. Blood-stained ingenuity repackaged as entertainment. She nodded and hummed where expected, squeezing her hands tightly in her lap.

They didn’t show Burleigh’s death.

She fought to suppress the victorious cheer that rose up her throat.

“Now, Johanna,” Caesar leaned in, voice low and conspiratorial, “everyone’s dying to know… What was the first thing you thought when you heard you won?”

Johanna blinked.

Nothing.

Taro was dead. She had his blood under her fingernails. The smell of poppies was still in her throat.

She was thinking about whether or not she could make it down the damn rock before the hovercraft shot her down with tranquilisers for disobedience.

Instead, she said, “I thought, ‘Finally, I get to shower.’”

The crowd roared.

Caesar laughed heartily. “Oh, she’s got jokes! Tell me, darling, what was the most surprising thing about the Capitol when you got here?”

The labiaplasty.

She smiled like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. “The food. Never seen so many types of cheese in my life.”

More laughter. Even Caesar chuckled, patting his stomach. “We do like our dairy. Now tell me-”

He paused for effect, the crowd leaned in.

“What’s next for you, Johanna Mason? What’s life after the Games look like?”

There it was. The question. The opportunity.

He asked the question every year.

She could see the outline of it in his eyes, the leash hidden behind the compliment. He was trying so hard to help. Anything that she mentioned would be something that the Capitol would see during the house and district tour section of the victory tour. She could use it to leverage herself some slack from Snow. Whatever she said would be marketed and sold to the Capitol so she may as well go full send. 

“Hopefully?” She tilted her head slightly, playing coy. “Rest. Maybe I’ll take up writing.”

“Oh ho! Our axe-wielding woodland queen, writing novels?”

“Don’t underestimate a girl with a pen.” She mimed stabbing him in the groin. 

She perhaps relished a bit too much in the genuine flinch that garnered.

The audience shrieked with delight. Caesar leaned in, faux charmed. She smiled like the cat who caught the canary and then dragged its entrails all over its owner’s front step. 

“Any hints about your Victory Tour outfit lineup?” he pressed.

She pretended to think, tapping one manicured finger against her chin. “One has mushrooms on it.”

“Mushrooms!”

“Poisonous ones,” she added sweetly, “to match the poppies”. The crowd gasped, delighted at what they thought was an inside scoop on the games.

Caesar clapped his hands together, diverting immediately. “Oho! I do believe we’re in for a treat, folks!”

The rest of the interview blurred together. More hollow questions. More performance. The flowers on her dress trembled under the heat of the lights, curling and shifting. Somewhere in the audience, she thought she caught sight of Taro - just for a moment - standing still as stone in the middle of the glittering seats, a beaming Ally on his shoulders, Burleigh stood at his shoulder, hunting knife in hand.

She didn’t blink. She just stared until they disappeared.

—

Finnick sat on one of the lounge chairs, tucked into the shadows of Gloss’ capitol flat. He watched Johanna perched beneath the lights, body encased in petals and thorns, smile glued on like shellac, gaining teeth when she answered a question. 

He’d worn that smile. Still wore it most days.

Her’s was different somehow, like she was waiting for a bunny to hop into her maw believing her to be harmless. At least until she would inevitably bite down.

Her fists were clenched so tight the veins on the back of her hands pulsed beneath her skin like bruises trying to rise. Her knuckles were white, and her knees didn’t quite touch, her feet were flat on the ground - predatorial posture buried under a thousand miles of foliage and the Capitol’s delusions about femininity and design.

She looked magnificent.

She looked like a caged lion waiting to be unleashed.

Caesar was working the crowd like a seasoned fisherman, and Johanna gave him just enough slack to keep the line taut. Her answers were witty, crisp, laced with thorns and double-meanings, but he could see the effort it took to stay that still. Her rage curled beneath the surface like oil over fire. Too close to the spark, and-

Finnick flinched slightly when her gaze swept the audience and locked somewhere deep in the crowd. She didn’t blink. Didn’t smile. Her mouth softened for the first time since she’d walked out under the lights.

He’d seen that look before.

Annie wore it when she called for her mum. 

He turned away from the screen.

Cashmere sat beside him with a flute of something sparkling in each hand. “She’s doing better than you did,” she murmured without venom, pity evident in the crease of her eyes, handing the glass over.

“I didn’t know what I was walking into,” Finnick said absently. “I think she knows. I reckon that's worse.”

Cashmere tilted her head, regarding the girl on stage. “You think she’ll survive it?”

He didn’t answer. Not at first.

Johanna laughed at something Caesar said - loud, bright, performative - and Finnick’s stomach curled with something bitter and exhausted.

“She’s smart,” he said finally. “But smart doesn’t always win here.”

He caught Gloss watching from the doorway, arms crossed. The three of them - the Capitol’s favored - could do nothing but watch and wait for the house of cards their newest colleague had built to come tumbling down.

Cashmere tilted her glass.

“To surviving,” she offered.

Finnick clinked his glass to hers.

“To the act of it.”

—

The interview went fine, She was shuffled straight off to an afterparty she didn’t realise existed. 

It was as dull as the banquet except she had to glare down several people when their hands wandered too far down her back in the middle of a dance.

She spotted several more victors there than there were the night previous. Mostly victors she remembered from the careers districts. They were all as symmetrical and unnerving as the body she was now inhabiting. 

Hysterically, she pictured herself putting all the girls in a line to see if their measurements all matched. 

It had been hundreds of years since she was alive the first time and yet beauty was still the most sought after trait in a woman. At least in the women with far less power or social clout than anybody in the capitol. 

“Mason.”

She turned to find herself face to face with blonde hair and dimples, “Odair.”

He had latched an arm around her waist and they went spinning off into the middle of the dance floor.

“You had the talk yet?”

Johanna had a hunch as to what he was on about.

“If you’re thinking about what I am, then no I haven't had a private audience with Snow and he has made no mention of having one.”

Tension that she didn’t realise he was carrying in his shoulders released and the rigid lines of their posture relaxed into a less formal version of the dance.

“So,” he drawled, “What are your plans when you're back in Seven?”

She replied absentmindedly about gutting her new house and refurbishing it because it was bound to be atroshiouly tacky after so many years but then her eye caught on something behind one of his stray curls.

She blinked once. Her brow furrowed.

The man turned to meet her eye.

Taro stood with his hands in the pockets of his silver overalls, a golden stalk of wheat between his teeth.

Not as she’d last seen him, bleeding and broken in her arms, but stood tall, eyes smiling, smirk soft at the edges.

She gasped. Finnick’s grip tightened on her waist instinctively.

“You good?” he asked under his breath.

“I- yeah,” she lied.

She blinked again and he was gone. Just a Capitolite in a grey shirt, not her Taro.

Get it together.

She and Finnick shared a drawn out but stilted conversation that would seem to be about absolutely nothing of substance to any eavesdroppers. He poked as subtly as he seemed to be capable of about what Snow’s plans for her probably were. Johanna made several inane remarks about how incredible the surgery’s were in the capitol and how inconvenient it was to have to re-tailor all of her dresses.

His face grew steadily darker as the conversion continued as he prodded for more information. After she remarked on not knowing that labiaplasty even existed until leaving the arena he finally dropped her off by the dessert table and made a clear line for Cashmere.

She watched him go but her eyes caught on a tiny crimson figure.

There, amidst a circle of fawning adults, stood Snow.

Not President Snow, of course; though for a flicker of a heartbeat, Johanna’s stomach had clenched as though the devil himself had entered the room; but his granddaughter. The resemblance was impossible to miss: the same pale skin and icicle eyes, the same calculating gleam buried just behind bright, harmless smiles.

But where the President’s presence induced the stillness of prey sensing a predator, Martia’s drew attention like a glittering trap. She was no more than eleven, if that, and already draped in couture so sharp it could’ve been used to flay a man alive. Her lips were painted poppy red.

Johanna blinked. Poppies.

Of course.

Even the girl’s perfume stank of it.

A chill climbed her spine, but she pasted on a smile.

She wasn’t the only one watching.

Johanna adjusted her grip on the plate she was pretending to be interested in, eyes flitting to the ornate cakes and sugar sculptures on display. She stabbed a miniature tart with her fork and made her way casually over, weaving through sponsors and stylists, mentors and sycophants.

Martia saw her coming.

Of course she did.

The girl straightened with almost military precision, flicking her platinum braid over one shoulder like she’d been born in a photo shoot. “Johanna Mason,” she said sweetly, her voice high and practiced like it had been coached for years. “I’ve been dying to meet you.”

“Oh yeah?” Johanna raised a brow and took a bite of the tart. It tasted like perfume and chemicals. “Can’t imagine why.”

Martia’s grin widened, revealing teeth too perfect for a child. “You’re everywhere. I told Grandfather you’re the only victor who doesn’t make me want to claw my own eyes out. Most of them are so tame.”

Johanna nearly choked. “Well, I do my best to disappoint.”

Martia giggled. “Not at all! I think it’s pretty cool that you’ve managed to be so powerful and so pretty at the same time. It's very inspiring.”

“Yeah,” Johanna said slowly. “That’s me. Pretty and powerful.”

Martia leaned in a little, her voice dipping to a conspiratorial whisper. “You know, it’s such a shame about what they did to your face. I liked the old one better.”

Johanna blinked once. Sharp little bratling.

“Yeah? You got a file on me or something?”

“I have several.” Martia beamed. “And access to Grandfather’s archives. Don’t worry,” she added, placing a gloved hand over Johanna’s wrist like a child trying to imitate comfort. “You looked fierce before. But this works too.”

Johanna opened her mouth, then closed it again.

What a precocious little shit. She kinda liked her.

Martia straightened and gestured imperiously to an avox standing nearby, who bowed with reverence before sprinting off.

“You should have a phone,” Martia said.

“I don’t know if i’m allowed to-”

“You are now.” She pulled a sleek new see-through device from herbedazzled purse and unlocked it with a thumbprint. The avox returned a moment later with a glass-like charger and case, which Martia handed off like party favors. “My number’s already in there. You’ll text me.”

“Will I?”

Martia’s smile thinned into something older than her years. “You want to survive, don’t you?”

There it was.

Johanna studied the girl. Pale, pristine, perfect. Just enough childhood left in her face to distract from the knife glint behind her words. Snow’s heir.

“How old are you, kid?”

“Ten and a half, the half is very important.”

“Uh huh.”

Martia leaned against the table like they were schoolyard friends. “I’ve been looking for someone. A big sister type. Someone cool. Someone who doesn’t mind getting their hands dirty. Grandfather says it’s good to have powerful friends. I want you to be one of mine.”

Johanna snorted. “Is this a job interview or a threat?”

“Why not both?”

Johanna looked down at the phone. Then at Martia.

This girl wasn’t stupid. She didn’t talk like a child. She talked like someone who knew that their proximity to power granted them immunity. Like someone already practicing the performance of cruelty in soft, manageable doses.

Like someone who would be very, very dangerous one day.

Johanna had no weapons here, no arena. But she had her instincts. And this girl could be useful. An ally. A buffer. A shield. Or maybe just a very shiny pawn in a game where everything - everyone - was already rigged.

“Alright,” Johanna said. “Big sister it is.”

Martia clapped her hands, delighted. “Oh, perfect! I’ll introduce you to my friends.”

Johanna nearly laughed. “You have friends?”

“Not really. That’s why I want you.”

Fucking hell.

Before Johanna could respond, Martia was dragging her across the ballroom floor like a prized accessory, already announcing to a collection of pre-teen Capitol spawn that “This is Johanna Mason, the most recent victor. She’s my new big sister”.

Johanna gave a stiff wave but didn’t smile.

Her fingers itched for an axe.

Currently, what with her being a tiny pigtailed ten year-old thing, Martia was struggling to find support and to network with the male kids in the years above her at her pretentious boarding school. 

She didn’t use any of those words, the girl for all her youth had mastered doublespeak, but her feelings on the matter were clear.

Johanna would bring more fame and glory and visibility to powerful women everywhere and would follow the girl around like a guard dog whenever she was in the Capitol. She would make herself a political weapon in her own right, and Martia would ‘sponsor her’ and essentially take credit for everything. In exchange for doing most of the work, Johanna would belong to Martia and wouldn’t be ‘given to Grandfather,' 'he asked me if he could keep you, ya know? I told him I had already had dibs on you since your interview, I have your signed poster and everything’.

Ultimately terrifying - and the girl was blatantly clueless as to what exactly she was sparing Johanna from - but altogether a golden opportunity presented to her on a silver platter. 

Johanna spent most of the party at the chocolate fountain with the terrifying little monster trading stories and gossip and monopolising each other’s attention.

As she was leaving her name was called out.

Eyes flickered between her and the other spectacle of the evening. 

Martia stood on the steps up to the balcony beside her grandfather. 

The girl waved and Snow gave a single nod.

Johanna could do nothing but bow. 

One fist over her heart and her other arm stretched wide. 

She exited stage left.

Time to go home.

—

They all saw it.

When she stumbled slightly getting off the dais.

When she dropped her fork supposedly to make the girl smile and her eyes flickered around the hall as she bent to retrieve it. Assessing, calculating.

When her laugh pitched too wild at something the president’s granddaughter said.

Nothing overt. Nothing that could be called real. Just enough to suggest that the veneer was too smooth, the polish too fresh. Something beneath it was rattling in its cage.

She was far too intelligent to have lived this long unmarred.

Nobody said anything, of course.

Just like wind-up props and background characters, they smiled and drank and pretended that nothing was out of the ordinary at all. But notes were passed and whispers were shared.

The Hunger Games were theatre. Johanna Mason was both stage and show. And she knew the script.

“Long may she reign,” someone toasted from across their observation room.

She looked directly at the camera and sneered.

Plutarch smiled into his drink.

May the odds be ever in your favour.

Chapter Text

The train shook slightly as it was jostled by rabid fans.

Johanna stood just outside on the boarding platform, bag slung carelessly over her shoulder, though everything she ‘owned’ had already been packed by someone else, they were mostly gifts and clothes and a few bits she managed to shop for between waking up and reaching the train that she would need before the tour started. The Capitol didn’t let victors carry anything real. Just symbols. Props.

She leaned against one of the marble pillars, chewing at the inside of her cheek. Not ready to go home, not even sure what “home” was anymore.

She wondered if Ollie had looked after her chickens.

Finnick emerged from the crowd of screaming rich people without ceremony. Just another shadow in her periphery until he was standing right beside her.

What a dangerous skill to have.

“You get your schedule yet?” he asked, like they were making casual conversation.

She didn’t look at him. “They sent it this morning. Victory tour starts in six weeks. Interview circuit before that. They want me to open a fucking fashion week show a month after it ends. Apparently I’m an ‘icon.’”

Finnick huffed, a breath that didn’t quite make it to a laugh. “Welcome to the club.”

“Do I get a badge?”

He secured an imaginary pin to her chest. “Says 'Most Likely to Be Offered to a Cabinet Minister by Christmas.'”

She rolled her eyes. “Too late. Already claimed by the tiniest heir-apparent in pigtails.”

Finnick blinked, then raised a brow. “Martia-Cleopatra?”

“Apparently she’s got dibs.” Her mouth twisted. “Guess I’m not sleeping with old men after all. Just playing dutiful big sister to the next President of Panem.”

Finnick was silent for a beat. “That might actually be worse somehow.” He scoffed under his breath, “I don’t envy you.”

“I know.” She looked at him now. “But it’s leverage. If I can keep her interest, I stay out of the auction block. For now.”

He nodded once, solemn. The mutual acceptance of their situation made her skin crawl.

“She sent me home with a phone,” Johanna added. “Preloaded contacts. I’m on a leash now.”

“You were always on a leash,” Finnick corrected quietly. “Now you can see it.”

They stood there a while, watching Peacekeepers hustle the last of the Capitol stragglers off the platform. The train gave a low mechanical groan. Johanna’s stomach did the same.

“Don’t get comfortable,” he said, still watching the tracks. “They let you think you’re safe, and then one day you get a phone call you can’t ignore.”

“You speaking from experience?”

His jaw twitched. “Snow doesn’t call people for no reason. Just pray that the bouquet is a warning and not an explanation.”

She didn’t ask for details. Didn’t offer any of her own. She thought she was seeing what his character in the books had been yapping on about. Truth was poison in the Capitol - currency to the people you shared them with - you only shared what you could afford to have used against you.

But she still asked, “You gonna be okay?”

Finnick hesitated. “I’ll tread water. You?”

She smirked, a small thing, “I’ll plant trees.”

That got a breath out of him. Not quite a smile, but it counted.

The train doors hissed open behind them. A final warning.

She turned to enter.

He caught her wrist - just for a second. Just long enough to slide something into her palm. Cold. Smooth.

A carved sea glass token rimmed in gold, sanded in the shape of a pinecone.

“For luck,” he said.

She blinked. Then, pocketed it without a word.

As she stepped onto the train, she didn’t dare look back.

Finnick did.

He watched the train disappear into the tunnel, jaw locked, hands buried in his pockets. Then he turned and disappeared into the Capitol - back into the circus.

—

The water steamed.

She finally managed a moment alone.

For a while, she just sat on the edge of the tub, watching it swirl - clear at first, then slowly muddied pink by the oils the Capitol insisted on adding to everything. Rosewood, bergamot, a hint of something synthetic.

Wealth and sterilised grief.

She slipped in slowly, knees drawn to her chest, arms wrapped around them. The tub was too big. Just as luxurious and wasteful as the rest of the fucking panem et circenses. Her skin prickled even before she touched the water, like it already knew this was going to hurt.

The heat stung her scars, no it didn’t. It stung the places where they used to be. Psychosomatic pain.

Once she was submerged, she finally uncurled.

She was alone.

No prep team. No stylists. No cameras. Not even Blight, whose presence lingered in her thoughts like salt on a wound.

She raised her arm from the water and watched the droplets slide down smooth, unmarred skin. She turned it slowly, inspecting it. There had once been a burn there, thin and knotted like melted wax from when she’d dropped a flaming branch when she was ten and practiced making campfires. It was gone. 

She moved to her chest.

The curve of her breasts was higher, fuller, firmer, shaped by hands she didn’t know. They didn’t hurt, but they didn’t right. She cupped them briefly, experimentally, and then dropped her hands like she’d touched something spoiled.

Her stomach was flatter than it used to be. Her abs had been sculpted into something just shy of caricature. Capitol abs. Fashion abs. Not her hard work, hunted meals and long days of manual labour.

Even her hips were wider.

That’s what struck her hardest.

She hadn’t noticed the space they took up until she tried to curl up in the train seat in the dining cabin earlier and didn’t quite fit the way she did that very first day. 

She dragged her fingers across her thighs, then lower.

The water gave no privacy. She saw everything through the shifting mirror of the bath - and forced herself to look.

They’d touched her there.

Altered her.

She pressed her palm over it and felt the smoothness, the unnatural symmetry, the lack of hair and more jarring lack of razorbumps that would indicate that it was growing back.

Clean lines. Neat folds. Unnatural.

The tears didn’t surprise her. She had run out of rage a day ago.

Now there was only grief. Quiet, cold, and endless.

She sank until her mouth disappeared beneath the water. 

She traced her cheekbone, feeling the point of it under her slowly pruning fingers. The bone was almost jagged in its sharpness. Her entire face felt alien. Even the inside of her mouth - she’d bitten her tongue earlier with polished veneer instead of her real teeth.

Johanna Mason was gone.

This body was a replacement. A costume. A correction.

They hadn’t left a single part of her untouched.

She slid deeper, letting the water lap at her ears. The world muffled, blurred.

Her fingertips rested lightly on the underside of her jaw - a new habit born from the arena, of feeling her own heartbeat there. It was still there. For now.

She would learn this body.

She would learn every inch of it like she’d once learned the trees in District 7 - which branches bent, which held her weight, which cracked under pressure.

Because she had to.

Because it was the only weapon she would have when they decide to throw her back into the arena.

And if they wanted to turn her into a doll, she would become one. Just to prove that it could be done. But she was waiting. Behind the porcelain skin and ivory bones. Hanna was watching, it was only a few years. 

Just four years left.

—

Seven was even more gorgeous and green than when she left it.

There was bunting everywhere, draped between the timbered buildings, strung between pine poles, woven with bark and dyed muslin, and ribbon’s made of old uniforms in lumberjack green and peacekeeper white and whatever scraps of celebration could be spared. It was an honest type of beauty.

What seemed like half of the north sect and all of south Seven had come down to greet her off the train.

The joy and the people just handing her things whenever she came in reach of them almost took her mind off of the camera crew entirely.

Her face hurt from smiling and she emptied her armful of stuff into a convenient bag that Blight was holding open for her.

The crowd followed her, all the way through town and to her shed. Claudette insisted on going that route and she didn’t bother questioning him.

She didn’t spare the shed a single glance as she kept moving.

Face forward, shoulders back, chin parallel to the floor.

The gates of the Victor’s Villa’s were open. Unlike what she read about and watched in twelve where they had classic four-bedroom detached houses, District seven had huge sprawling log cabins that sat pleasantly by a man-made stream. Most were six bedrooms large (as seven was one of the districts with the highest population and the largest families) but Johanna was given one of the two either side of the main gate.

They were easily double the size of the rest.

They were the first ones built when Snow created incentive for winners after Mags’ game in 11 A.D.D, they were more for show than for use. They were two of the tallest buildings in the residential district and were made using Cap-sync materials. The wood was real, not the fast growing, genetically modified stuff that was in circulation the last fifty years. It had about eight roofs, and huge glass windows. 

The design was rustic compared to the ultra-modern, ultra high-tech houses that sprawled the rest of the massive plot of land.

She had a sinking feeling in her gut.

Nobody lived in the house opposite hers.

Nobody lived in the house next to hers either, the others were all spread about further into the reservation.

They made it closer to the building and she found that the bottom floor was made of stone, like a foundation for the rest of the floors of the house.

She didn’t even realise that the bottom floor existed.

Holy shit, it was far too big for her alone.

She could easily survive out of one room and it would still be a luxury.

There was something grotesque about it. Not the grandeur - that was expected - but the fact that she was meant to live in it. Alone.

There would be a pantry stocked by Capitol handlers. A hearth she wouldn’t light. A dining table that could seat twelve, maybe fifteen, but would never host a single soul unless a camera crew or a Peacekeeper briefing demanded it.

She hated that she was already imagining what rooms to seal off.

Blight gave her shoulder a squeeze before he turned away, heading toward his own cabin down the stream. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. His silence felt like the closest thing to real companionship she’d had in weeks.

She stepped inside.

The air smelled like varnish and Capitol polish - chemically crisp, like it had never seen dirt, sweat, or bark dust. Her boots echoed on the slate floor. Somewhere above, a vent clicked softly, kicking on with artificial warmth.

Everything was already in place.

A set of axes - clearly decorative - mounted over the mantle. Woven pine furniture. A full set of cookware and glassware lined up in geometric perfection. Not a single object out of place.

And buttons.

She hadn’t noticed them at first, but now that she was inside, she saw them tucked quietly here and there. In bowls, on side tables, even slipped between the pages of a book left open on the reading chair. Not hers. Burleigh’s.

She didn't know who had done it. Claudette, maybe. Or someone else from the sect who had known him better.

Johanna dropped the sack of buttons onto a bench by the door. The weight of them thudded like a body.

She should unpack.

She should eat.

She should sleep.

She should do something.

But instead, she moved to the nearest wall and pressed her forehead against the cold, smooth stone - just to feel something that wasn’t curated.

It grounded her. Reminded her she was still real, still solid. Still here, even if she half wished she wasn’t.

She stood like that for a long time. Until the light outside dimmed. Until the air inside stopped smelling new and started to smell like her.

She pulled herself together and had a rummage through her bags. She had the new stationary she’d bought in the capitol,the laptop and the portable wifi box she was assured would work in the districts - apparently it was a company run by a victor from three -  along with the huge bag of clothes that she had tossed together whilst Tish was doing her a solid and choosing her laptop for her.

The other bag was still by the front step.

She went over to fetch it.

She grabbed a bowl and plopped it on the kitchen island out of her cupboard and emptied half of the bag into it.

Buttons.

Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds.

Some were cleanly cut, others jagged at the edge like they’d been ripped from fabric in a hurry. Some had thread still clinging to their backs, frayed and tangled. Most were brown or green, a few silver or bone-white, and one or two still glinted faintly, mother-of-pearl catching the last of the light through the cabin windows.

She ran her fingers through them like water. They clinked against the bowl, against each other, against the counter.

Not one of them had a tag or note. No explanation. No Capitol pomp. Just small, silent offerings.

They were from her people. Of course they were. Buttons from their shirts, their jackets. From the uniforms of loggers who knew her. From kids who'd heard stories and wanted to give her something - something real, something Seven.

The Capitol had given her gold and silk and surgery and trauma.

Seven gave her these.

Johanna reached into the bag again and again until her hands were empty. The last button she fished out was smooth and dark green, carved with the faint outline of a wheat stalk. She rolled it between her fingers before setting it carefully on top of the pile in the bowl.

She didn't cry.

She just stared at the buttons for a while silently.

Then she stood, dug out a notepad and pen from the Capitol stationery - something with a ridiculous filigree border - and crossed to the wide, sterile counter of the kitchen.

She flipped to a clean page.

At the top, in small block letters, she wrote:

Things I Will Not Forget.

Under it, the first entry:

Burleigh's laugh - the one he only used when he was talking to Ally.

She stared at it a moment, then underlined it twice.

Then she wrote:

Number of buttons: 276. They will stay in the bowl.

She paused, then added:

No Capitolites allowed to touch them. Ever.

A few more lines. A few more memories. Just until her hand cramped.

Taro’s little smirk he got when Ally snorted in her sleep.

Ally’s hyena laugh when I killed the bear.

Taro’s small smile, the private one that he gave me right before the final countdown.

Then she got up, carried the bowl to the mantle, and set it just beneath the fake axes. If anyone came, they could ask about them. Maybe she’d tell them. Maybe she wouldn’t.

But they were staying there.

And then, only then, did she let herself cry; quiet, tight-shouldered sobs that barely made a sound in a house far too well furnished to echo.

She shouldn’t have been the one who made it home. 

This house wasn’t made to be inhabited.

Maybe in the next life they’d be reincarnated as siblings.

Maybe in the next life they wouldn’t suffer for the greed of powerful men. 

—

It was late when she left Victor's Villas.

No cameras, no handlers. Just the weight of silence and the need to see it for herself.

She didn’t take the paved road. She ducked behind the maintenance fence and took the back way - winding through brush and low trees, her boots crunching on old pine needles. The air smelled of woodsmoke and distant rain.

Her old neighborhood hadn’t changed.

But it seemed smaller now. Less of her life revolved around the single cobbled street..

She saw the shed from a distance first. The rusting tin roof. The leaning chicken wire fence. It had always been crooked, but it used to feel like home.

Now it looked like a ruin.

She stepped closer.

The coop door hung open. The wind whistled through the slats, where feathers once danced on the breeze.

Inside, it was quiet. It’s never been quiet before.

No soft clucking. No smell of straw and warm feathers.

There was just death.

All the chickens were gone. Not taken, not sold. Just dead. Their little bones lay scattered among the hay, picked clean by time or scavengers.

But that wasn’t what stopped her breath.

It was the petals.

White rose petals - shrivelled now, browned at the edges - spread across the ground like some kind of funeral rite. Some were tucked into the cracks in the coop wall. Others lay in the dirt, nestled in chicken droppings and rot.

This would have been done whilst she was in the arena.  It had only been a few days since they finished.

She crouched, ran her hand over them. They crumbled under her touch, drifting off with the breeze like ashes.

She turned her head. The little spot at the end of the road where she’d once kept her old ‘pay what you can’ box was splintered open, smashed like someone had taken an axe to it. The tesserae she used to keep in it was long gone. Just a few bent nails remained.

She stood slowly. Her eyes were dry, but her throat burned.

She didn’t belong here. Not anymore. Not in the coop. Not even in the mansion.

The woods, maybe. The trees. But they couldn’t house her either.

She made her way over to it.

There was a small plaque, clearly made from a scrap of bark, not even proper wood, and it read St.12.East Row. 

She crushed it under her boot in case anyone was monitoring her and wandered in the direction of Twelth Street. The streets in twelve followed a very New York set up, and whilst that was no doubt the inspiration, they looked more like the tree plantations that anything resembling a major city. 

She turned the corner and there it was. A full street that all had small crates or boxes or drawers or baskets or benches all placed just inside their properties. On their land. Small - far smaller than the original - ‘pay what you can’ spaces with little matching signs. 

She staggered to the nearest one, her legs feeling like jelly. 

A small pot of tesserae and a few jars and bottles of cow milk. 

The next one over, a small pot of tesserae and bundles of aloe vera.

The next one, a pot of tesserae and baby clothes.

Next, tesserae, needles and thread.

Next, tesserae, eggs and feathers.

Next, tesserae, scraps of fabric and homemade dish soap. 

Next, tesserae, tiny little thimble sized tubs of honey.

Next, knitted blankets and loose single socks. 

Next, storybooks and old battered textbooks.

Next, wooden kids toys.

And on and on it went. No fresh meat, nobody barring Johanna seemed to have the guts to hunt so close to the ‘wilds’ - likely because none of them knew it was just Canada.

She wandered through the street, pulling the few rings she was still wearing from her fingers to drop into a few boxes of families that she knew were struggling themselves, or were regulars at her own box and still decided to chip in. 

A weight lifted off her chest and suddenly her skinn didn’t feel like it was stretched so tightly. 

When she finally returned to the Victor’s Village, she didn’t go to bed. She pulled out the Capitol-bought laptop, powered it on, and opened a blank document.

Then she opened another tab, connected to the private Victor-run server the District tech representative at Latier Tech had slipped to her under the guise of ‘gaming software,’ and started researching.

Matilda

Matilda the Musical

Roald Dahl

The Capitol database showed nothing. The archives from the pre-Dark Days era were patchy at best, with most literature and theatre scrubbed or lost in the war.

Matilda hadn’t made it. Or if it had, it had no digital traces.

Johanna opened the fresh document.

She started typing.

Writing.

She worked from memory jumping around the play in huge chunks of text that she could reorganise later. She changed a few things. Switched out some lines that were too on-the-nose. Made it District-safe. Changed the ending so Miss Honey didn’t adopt Matilda - Instead she took Miss Honey’s little cottage and continued going to school and continued being self-sufficient.

She wrote and re-wrote for hours, fingers flying, until the sun was rising again and her body ached from stillness.

She ate some food, slept, and then sat right back down at the desk in one of the ground floor studies to keep writing. 

Again and again and again until she had every single scrap she could remember, every costume change or set design.

And then she did it again. 

Peter Pan

West Side Story

Les Mis

Legally Blonde

And finally, when she built up the courage, 

The Hunger Games

She saved the files under innocuous names like Fireplace Log Inventory 3A. Then she backed it up twice - once to the desktop and once on a sleek USB drive she tucked into the seam of the mattress in what she had dubbed guest bedroom 6.

She didn’t tell anyone about it.

Not Claudette. Not Blight. Not even Finnick whose number had somehow found its way onto her phone along with a second contact with the plug emoji.

They’d either understand or they wouldn’t. But this was hers.

A tiny rebellion. A quiet memory of something that had once made her feel like more than a piece in somebody else’s game.

She closed the laptop.

She lay back, head on her stiff new pillow, and stared at the ceiling.

Soon, the tour would begin.

She would smile and wave and make speeches in every District. Tell kids that the Games were glorious. That they could survive too. That they could kill just as easily as she did.

And maybe, when she came back again, she’d have the courage to bury the bones in the coop. Maybe she’d plant something in the petals. Or maybe she’d rebuild, she certainly had the space for it.

And then she would plot and plan and make contingencies and write her will.

But not yet.

And so she slept. Not deeply. Not peacefully.

But enough.

Enough to make it through to tomorrow.

To the start of the victory tour.

—

Johanna clasped the mug between her hands, though whatever warmth the tea had once offered was long gone, leeched out into the muggy, warm air of District 7’s mid summer, the temperature fluctuations were wild, she was sure that North America was supposed to just be fucking cold all the time. Her muscles were locked tight from the cold, jaw clenched, shoulders stiff beneath her coat. If a pack of mutts came charging through the underbrush right now, she doubted she’d make it halfway up a tree before they tore her apart.

She should’ve gotten up. Walked around. Shook the stiffness from her limbs and let her body remember it was still alive.

But instead she sat - still as a stump, as unyielding as the solid earth beneath her - watching the gray dawn bleed slowly through the trees. Another day began. One she didn’t want.

She couldn’t stop it.

The sun would rise whether she screamed at it or not.

By midday, they’d all be at her shiny new prison in Victor's Villas. Capitol camera crews, reporters in synthetic furs, her escort Claudette with his nasal voice and powdered smile. Probably dressed like a Dorito again. There’d be the prep team waiting too, ready to scrub and polish her like a piece of furniture. Sparrow to stitch her into whatever pre-approved image of Victor-Tribute Johanna Mason the Capitol needed today.

They’d call it the start of the Victory Tour.

She called it a funeral parade for future tributes. Tributes that she would inspire to volunteer to die.

There was an uptick in volunteers from the higher district for a fwe year’s after Finnick’s games as well. Fuck. 

If it were up to her, she’d pretend the Hunger Games never happened. She wouldn’t speak of them. Wouldn’t think of the blood-soaked arena or the way that Taro had smiled in her lap as he bled out. That was the thing about being a Victor, she didn’t get to pretend. 

She was Capitol property now.

She had the text messages to prove it. 

The Victory Tour was their way of keeping everyone obedient. A celebration of death. One more reminder that the Capitol chose who lived, who died, and who got paraded through every district as a crowned killer.

And this year, Johanna won.

She would ride the train, stand on stages in front of people who would clap because they had to, whose eyes would flick down to the dirt because she was the reason their son or daughter was gone and she would smile.

She'd smile through it all.

And then she'd come home and scream into the walls of her huge empty home.

After the tour ends she might be able to justify making it less empty. 

Blight managed to get a note out to the Smokehouse orphans that if her tour went well, she would take them in. 

They knew the value of bartering and insurance. They knew it well enough to understand their place in the game between the victors and Snow.

It isn’t early in the day anymore. 

At this time Johanna would’ve usually wandered through the streets and the woods on the Victor’s plot or she’d be taking a lap of the lake in the heart of the sectioned off land.

She instead busied herself with clothes. 

She pulled on some high waisted wide-legged trousers in a nice green with a flowy flower-embroidered top that she hoped would hide the slopes and curves of her new figure. 

They were in the ‘Sparrow sanctioned’ suitcases that arrived a few days after she was back in the district. The huge haul of randomly sized clothes that she had bought at the capitol had been sorted and laid out by size and sex in one of the several lounges. When she got back she would see about redoing her little trading box out by the gates of the villas.

If she got back.

The gates opened. 

The street lights lit.

The cameras rolled in.

Action.

Chapter Text

She couldn’t even take a full breath before Tish, The Boys and Claudette bustled her back into her home. They oohed and ahhed over the interior and the furniture, calling everything ‘vintage’ and charming’. She grabbed Tish by the wrist and dragged her into the main bathroom, which was more of a hot tub than an actual bath. She immediately unbuckled her bag and dumped what looked like a litre of oils and salts into the empty tub.

The boys entered after her, rolling in a trolley cart filled with gleaming silver torture devices and more chemicals in little dropper bottles.

She was stripped once the tub was full and surrendered all of her limbs and her head into the prep team’s tender mercies.

“Isn't it brilliant?”

“Don't you feel so lucky?”

“Think of all the opportunities to show off your designs, Sparrow was all but beaming when she received your email.”

She did actually find the time to properly draw up thirteen different outfits for each stop of the tour. She left the details vague but the vision clear so that Sparrow could actually do her job. It was somewhere between ensuring that she had a full timetable of everything she could remember from the whole Hunger Games trilogy and writing out everything she remembered of Victorian flower language to give to the principals of all 20 schools in the district.

“I can’t wait to see the one for District Four! Sparrow let slip that you were intending to lean into the themes of each district! Isn’t that adorable!”

The schools in the district were just giant, multi-story warehouses split into sections for different age levels. Every single kid in the district was sorted into their schools based entirely on where they live, however, they don’t change schools if they move house, so some kids, like Johanna,  were supposed to be trekking all the way from North 7 down to South 4 just to get there. 

Because the buildings and their intakes were so big, there was no register taken so the only time anybody ever made that long a journey was for their exams. She never thought about it much but it really drove home the them versus us narrative that the Capitol seemed to be pushing for in Seven.

Seven was a conglomeration of three states, shoved into a city-sized residential area built up of people who were both physically strong and had decent funding for their schooling compared to the lower districts. The Capitol needed them kept apart in order to keep them down. 

“And I've seen a huge shipment of gold come in from One which is so interesting! Ooh! And the glassblowers from Four!”

Intermingling between the different zones, however, happened far more than people in positions of power wanted to admit. Especially when all the biologists came from South East 1 and the wood carvers came from South West 2, and the north was entirely made up of woodcutters and field workers. They were the people who were statistically less likely to be reaped. 

They were just too well-prepared and physically fit to keep up the status quo of upper district supremacy. 

Johanna Mason was born in South 7, which dealt with things like laying pavements and fixing up houses or doing minor renovations, but she was raised in North 5. Her dad wasn’t supposed to be a woodcutter, but his parents had too many kids and couldn’t afford to hire him for their building company. And so they found themselves in the odd middle ground of being physically better off but stuck with the shite odds at the reaping and one of the crappy journeys for her exams. She still went, of course, it would have drawn attention if she didn’t attend but it was still jarring to move from Cobbled streets to packed mud.

Unlike the lower districts, most of the money in Seven could be found in the North, where the people who focus on the District’s main export work.

They needed the money because they needed more food just to keep working at a level that justifies hiring them in the first place rather than just automating everything. 

The merchants also depended on the relative wealth of the plantation workers to keep their own businesses afloat. But the South were all factory workers or artisans who were lucky to make one big sale a year. They were paid the absolute minimum that they could live on and they stood in the paper mills and the debarking stations and just watched or pushed buttons to make sure things ran smoothly.

They were the people who paved the roads of Upper Seven and tended to the ‘Capitol Areas’ that could be seen on their reaping days like the Community Square and Main Street that veered off into Victor’s Drive. 

They were gardeners and cleaners and bin men and artisans that managed maybe two or three big sales a year when a Capitol Tour or holiday group swung by and were feeling particularly ‘lumberjack-chic’. 

And Johanna was born to be one of them.

She made a mental note to check through the previous thirty reapings. Blight was also a ‘Changeling’. He was from the blacksmiths in South East 1 and moved to North 3 as a kid. The little girl that was reaped the year before was from North 2 but her parents had the distinctive features of factory workers from the South zones. They were thin and sallow with small cuts all the way up their forearms and crisscrossing all over their fingers.

“I just can't wait to see what the gemstones are for! Sparrow refused our help because she wanted to document the design and creative process to put out as a short film to promote the exhibition and auction that she has coming up and it’s going to be divine, did you know-”

Finally, she was pulled out of the bath and into a guest bedroom that had been repurposed as a dressing room. 

She would probably keep it like this after they left, she didn’t even think of that as an idea.

Three dresses were stuck on mannequins in front of the window. 

Tish had her stand behind each one so they could decide ‘which will go best with your complexion darling!’.

They opted for an ivory skintight dress with a mesh back that was embroidered with a scene of the lake and mountains in the Victor’s plot, the skirt was pleated and short and flouncy.

She hated it.

It wasn’t one of her designs, it wasn’t even Sparrows. 

Sparrow knew to draw attention to her face and shoulders, not her waist and chest. 

Somebody else designed this, and it was chosen in place of a Sparrow design somehow.

She lifted her eyes to the ceiling to avoid looking in the mirror.

All too soon there was a knock at the door. Blight had come back in to double-check about her ‘hobby’. 

Every victor is supposed to have one. Her hobby is the activity that all victors take up since they don't have to work either in school or in their district's industry. It can be anything, really, anything that they can be interviewed about. Blight’s was woodcarving, classic and very on-theme. Johanna decided to take a page out of Canon Peeta’s book and decided on painting because she could do as much or as little as she wanted and it would work out fine. Of course, Sparrow objected and so a few of the scrapped Victory Tour designs were going to be shown off as well.

All the canvases were set up downstairs. She had called Claudette to ask about having some paint sent up with her groceries for her art and he sent what amounted to an entire studio. She kept everything in the unused garage and only ever took to the canvas’ when she needed stress relief. 

She had covered a few decorative axes that were arranged around the house in red paint and thrown them through one of the larger wood-backed canvases but the others were just used for her to get wrist deep in a can of gold paint and work out the anger.

They were propped up on easels around the back of the garage, and the dresses - mostly half-finished and made to display particularly cool parts of their designs were front and centre.

There was also a small side table set up in the middle with a bound book filled with all the sketches she had sent to Sparrow both before and after the games.

Whilst the camera crew were busy getting artsy shots of all the pages and the display pieces, Johanna was being helped into the heeled sandals that she was expected to stumble around in.

A text popped up on her phone.

Nuts: Train ETA 1500, arrival 12 0130. PK presence low. Doors open 0930. H.A. NC, speak to U.S.

Wiress had made a point of texting Johanna whenever she could. It was a lot easier for her to communicate in written form where she could take her time laying out what information she wanted to get across. The woman was far too brilliant for her own good. Johanna had texted her a few days after she figured out that it was her who had hacked her phone and given her Finnick’s number - and more recently - Mags and Seeder. 

Apparently, she had also taken steps to ‘improve firewalls’ and something about an IP address that went straight over her head after having a snoop through her laptop and finding what little she had of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. 

Which was terrifying.

Johanna had read the message updating her on the security of her laptop and didn’t stop shaking for days. 

The new message was in regard to the hastily pieced-together evacuation plans that she wanted to have in place before the 75th games. The victory tour was literally the only time she would get to visit each and every district so she had to make it count. 

She had until nine-thirty the next day to put together a plan to present to Mayor Undersee for a bomb shelter in the old mine shafts and a way to import gas masks from Three (thank fuck for Wiress) as well as explain why they would be necessary without coming across as insane. 

Her backup plan was already in the works, she had several small booklets detailing all the major pieces of information that were easy to hide and easier to burn or even eat to remove evidence (as they were written on wafer paper). She would try to sneak them to a few of the kids from either the seam or the merchants. They were all kids in a shit situation and - like all kids - were likely very experienced in gossiping or ratting people out to their parents who would take it far more seriously. 

She had written what was needed for a bunker, how deep they should aim for it to be, the max capacity so they would know how many to make to safely house their population for a week or two, and how far the tunnels could be used to escape the tunnel after that period of time should go. Then she added triggers or patterns to look for to start evacuating or evacuation prep. The list was everything that she remembered leading up to the 75th games: Increased Peacekeeper presence, punishments increased for minor rule-breaking, tesserae arriving in notably poor quality, a complete break from coal as a source of fuel in the Capitol decreasing sales to just the other districts. Destruction or removal of trading halls or charities. 

She had similar booklets written for all the lower districts. Eleven wouldn’t need it. The Capitol would never risk removing its largest naturally-grown food source. Even one bad harvest year would cost them loads.

She has to hope it’s enough for the people of twelve and eight. The back few pages of the booklet were filled entirely with plants native to America that had useful qualities when it came to medical care. As well as a few that weren’t that they could ask their victor to order in. She had ordered and grown a few small pots of Aloe Vera to hand out to any adults in literally all of the districts to hopefully ensure that it was available to treat burns or open cuts like whip wounds and lashes. 

She had taken the initiative to call ahead to ask one of the many many people working in the production team for the Victory Tour to ask if it would be alright to bring gifts for the victors or mayors of each district. Unfortunately, that meant that at most she could bring in herself, were three pots for District Twelve (For Haymitch, Mayor Undersee and his daughter), but they had three and a half years to grow and care for them to ensure they would have enough but direct sunlight and proper drainage would have them growing well. 

She may not have liked him as a character but the whipping scene with Gale had inspired that specific choice. 

Martia had been far more help than expected when she texted her idea, apparently fostering good relations with the other Victors could only help with integrating Johanna into Capitol life and would make her better at ‘spying like in the cool movies, grandpa has a lot of spies’ or information gathering to ensure that Little Snow remained on top.

She had convinced her Grandfather to let her get a second PR bank account that she could use to make herself look better in the eyes of the public - on Johanna’s suggestion. Organising fundraisers to support the testing and cure creation for the few diseases that had not been cured yet and visiting hospitals of sick children to bring them gifts. 

Judging by the many delighted messages that she had been receiving for the last few months it was working a charm and the children above Martia's age group who were related to other powerful figures had been instructed to befriend her by their parents. 

Nobody had been looking at the little girl with anything more than apathy, not expecting her to measure up to the political power or awareness of her Grandfather until now and they were all suffering for it. 

The first time a bouquet turned up on her doorstep she almost had a heart attack. 

The note was from Martia and it was a thank you for the suggestion about going into healthcare and supporting the increased money flow around the Capitol as people scrambled to follow her example, further lining her family's pockets.

She had received several more since.

None of her fellow victors dared to speak to her until the third one had come and gone and nothing dreadful had happened. 

They had decided (Johanna had persuaded) that Martia would wait the full six months until after her tour to start bringing Johanna to events and charity galas to ensure that the increased popularity and visibility would be put to good use. 

“Right! Darling we need a few shots of you walking between the different pieces in the studio and a voiceover of you explaining the thought process behind the designs, then we’ll do a few shots where you roam through the district and interact with a few locals. We’ll take those shots later and then at two-thirty, we’ll hopefully have enough edited footage to nicely lead us to a live shot of you walking through the main square and onto the train.” And on and on they went, discussing details in terms that went right over her head. 

Johanna moved where she was told to, looked appropriately interested at the half-finished interpretations of her designs and traced her finger over the edges of the axe blade in the canvas. And then she sat and spoke for an hour about her district about her experience in the capitol, about the difference in living between her old house with her parents and her new house alone (she doesn’t mention the shed or the hunting or the long hours of labour) and then she walks the main streets of her district where the people know not to loiter and the only people to acknowledge her on camera where the Peacekeepers who were specifically from District Two. 

She played her role and the puppeteer pulled her strings and finally, finally, she was waving in the doorway of the train, Blight at her shoulder and Tish with the boys in the lounge. 

One down.

Nuts: Cabin 4, wrapped boxes, US1, US2, HA. Good luck.

—

Wiress had somehow managed to get seed packets into the damn gifts. There were hundreds of small gift boxes, leaves poking out of the top of the packaging, separated by district, scattered around various tables that had been dragged into the empty bedroom with even more in a huge crate labelled ‘extra’.

This was where Burleigh slept, like every male tribute before him since the train was put into commission. 

Each box had a label and a printed card explaining what the plant was and what it did. Districts Twelve through five all received Aloe, with the only distinction being six. Six were set to get Passionflower and Rhodiola Rosea, both sourced using Martia’s connections and had calming qualities and were used to aid in drug or alcohol withdrawal. Four were going to get Echinacea which was used for infections. Three had a lovely selection of Peace Lillies, which improve air quality by absorbing acetone (which was of course used in the production of Technology). She had chosen buttercups for Two and One were to receive Meadowsweet.

Fuck, she had her work cut out for her.

This was fine. It would all be fine. 

The gifts would be received, the notes read and they would know what they need to keep the things alive and they have small seed packets of a few additional plants for air purity and healing in most of the bags. 

She could do this. Go out there smile, show off her dress because nobody gives a shit about the speeches, hand over gifts, shake some hands, pose for the camera, eat dinner, go back to the train, wave, go to bed, repeat.

She’ll be fine. She has to get back to the district for Ollie and for the rest of the smokehouse kids. She has to make it to the 75th Hunger Games to protect Beetee and Katniss and hopefully Wiress and ensure that the arena comes crashing down.

Nobody can afford for Johanna Mason to die.

Chapter Text

Was it possible to get black lung from just walking around Twelve?

Because fucking hell.

There was literal coal dust clinging to the tops of her damned shoes and her eyes were watering.

And this was Twelve at it’s best, or at least she assumed it was, Seven had to do a full wipedown and neatening of all the areas that could possibly be caught on camera. It was literally ordered by the Mayor. She could assume quite easily that it was the same deal for the rest of the districts.

It was so much worse than she thought. 

She felt so tall. 

All the people were gaunt and tiny and coal-streaked. 

Even the supposed ‘merchies’ who were meant to have been fed well just weren’t. Well… Some of them were. 

It was very noticeably the eldest sibling in every blonde family who was the tallest member, with the fattest cheeks and the widest frames. 

Twelve could not be sustainable. It just couldn’t work. Not when the adults outnumbered the kids so obviously. Not when there was more coal in the air than oxygen and even the water they were offered was declined by Blight in favour of the bottled stuff he’d swiped from the train.

Fuck, did the eradication of the district show signs of happening so early? She didn’t think it was that prevalent in the movies or the books, but knowing what she knew - mainly through Wiress and her new internet set-up - there was a project happening in Five to try and replicate a smaller nuclear power-plant like the ones from Thirteen which would annihilate any real use that Twelve would have in powering their generators. If all went well, the country could rely entirely on the Hydroelectric dam and the new Project Nefer and its eventual expansion.

It had been in the works for years, which, now that she thought about it, was probably why the older generations were taller as elderly people than their children. 

Before the dam was being used and the solar farms set up and fully connected to the grid in the year 14 Post Dark Days, District Twelve was the foundation of the country. That wasn’t the case anymore.

There was a large platform set up at the back of the crowd. Both of the tributes were supposed to have families standing under their faces to receive the VItro’s message. 

There was just one man, standing right in the middle.

Both of the kids’ faces were staring down at her. Cole and Char Bullest. The only two children of a single father who looked just like them. Dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin and coal packed into every line and wrinkle on his body and high cheekbones, not unnatural like her new ones, but the sort of cheekbones you would expect from Native American people.

She turned her eyes away when they met his gaze and instead scanned the crowd. 

Attendance was mandatory and the kids were all pushed to the front rows supposedly so they could ‘see better’ but it was mostly so that the stupid propaganda could sink its claws in and tear away any illusions they had regarding their futures. Another reason for this, she was somewhat disturbed to note, was that the kids were closest to the majority of the peacekeepers. They were all lined up like toy soldiers in front of the reaping stage with only a few scattered around the perimeter.

She scanned the rows as she read out the opening segment of the pre-made speech automatically. She had asked for the thing in advance a month ago. It was the same for every district until four and then she would alter the final few paragraphs either on the spot or off her cards to tailor it to each District.  

She couldn’t expect them to look like the very healthy, attractive actors used in the movies. That would be daft. 

Especially so young.

She had about four candidates of seam girls with even younger girls clutching at their skirts or dresses who could be Katniss and Prim and she was pretty sure she’d found Peeta.

Haymitch hadn’t graced them with his presence yet, which was apparently par for the course and they would see him at dinner.

She didn’t really interact with the kids from Twelve. What she did know was that they both died on the first day. Char escaped the bloodbath by literally turning her ass around and bolting the fuck out of there but her brother died trying to claim a medium sized backpack. 

Char only made it to sundown before she was hunted down by the careers. 

Her speech was pretty cut and dry, thanking the father and offering him a gift, of which he accepted with a little nod, and mentally congratulated herself for sneaking that in there as she finished up her little appearance as the cardboard cut-out of a victor.

The camera crew made everyone wait for fifteen minutes while they got shots of the back of her dress as she was facing out towards the crowd. She spent the whole thing making increasingly ugly faces that pulled on her facial modifications at the giggling kids in the front few rows. 

The disapproving stare down she had been receiving for the last half hour had abated slightly when she managed to lighten up their tired little faces if only for a few minutes. 

She turned to leave the stage and her shoulders relaxed. 

That was perfect. No rebellious undertones. Just Capitol bollocks that everybody could tell she was reading straight off the cards. Her team was sending her not-at-all discreet thumbs ups, jazz hands and silent claps from where they stood just inside the doors of the Justice Building. 

They yanked her straight into a room they had put together for her to change clothes. Out of her crown (the very same she was coronated with), her gold bangles and wide flat necklace that came across more like a collar and the coal-streaked Ancient Grecian inspired long white dress and a huge solid gold belt designed to look like a corset that was engraved with the scene from her games similar to the one that would go on the stairs of her district within the next week. It was a panoramic shot of her and her alliance all decending the rocks, fending off the bears.

The outfits were designed to be similar but increasingly extravagant for each speech; the only real differences in the outfits were the ones she would wear for her tour and then dinner or the party in each district. 

They had switched her over into something very similar to her outfit from the morning before. Flared pleated trousers in a warm brown with a forest green blouse and heeled boots. All the gold makeup had been wiped off and replaced with brown eyeliner and some lip gloss that she was assured by the boys several times ‘will not pick up any of the coal dust in the air, we promise’. 

Blight managed to get to the train and back in the time it took and had returned with a basket filled with the allocated District Twelve plants and a few from the ‘extra’s’ stash.

She deliberately made visiting the twins’ house the first priority, dragging the complaining capitolites through the packed mud and coal-coated streets of the seam. Several families were watching from behind the dirty glass of their houses and any that were out on the streets steered around them like she had parted the sea. 

The house was a small thing, a bungalow with one bedroom that had two beds squished into it, the only thing that it really had going for it was the small vegetable garden outside and the fact that there was thick plastic covering the roof tiles so the place wasn’t as moldy as some of the other’s looked. 

She opted to go in with only one camera man, who left very shortly after watching her hand over one of the Aloe plants in her basket which allowed her the time to explain.

She told the man, Bernie, what the plant was for and how to use it and then she pulled a bangle out of her pocket. 

It was a wide chunk of gold that wrapped around the top of her arm in one of the few rejected outfits that she had asked to keep for ‘any formal events’. The clueless capitol style team just giggled and agreed nattering on about ‘hot dates’ and ‘displaying her assets’. 

He started properly crying when she handed it to him. 

He could sell it whole to the imported peacekeepers or he could break it down and sell the material itself to the blacksmith or trade bits of gold for food. 

It could last him a year if he put the effort in.

Then she handed over the booklet that he was too teary-eyed to read and left to meet the crew.

After having her hand’s wiped down to remove ‘the grime of the district people’ - as though she were not one of them - they resumed the actual tour. Moving through the merchant’s high street back down the main road and over to Victor's Village to collect Haymitch and return for dinner.

—

Haymitch was a mess.

He was drunk off his tits and stumbling as he descended the stairs. The camera crew got a few shots of him embarrassing himself and slurring curses before she had enough. 

She grabbed his flask out of his hand and maneuvered herself under his arm.

Before anybody could complain or offer to switch she started up a long stream of chatter about differences between Twelve and Seven. She watched his eyes slowly but surely start to focus as they neared the main roads as she started up a repetition of some of the gossip she had been fed in town about how a young doll called Aspen has been put quite tightly on the spot to choose between three suitors who all wanted her hand, however Aspen’s eyes followed a lad from the south who was amusingly enough, refusing to give her the time of day because he believed himself unworthy of her. 

To be fair, she was the Mayor’s niece and she really could do better but the heart wants what it wants and she was sure to not really want for anything essential based on her own father’s income however, any children they would have would undoubtedly be ‘very fairly’ reaped from the bowl. 

Pure coincidence of course. 

They were nearing the justice building, which was apparently where they would be eating when Haymitch began pulling away and made to walk by himself. 

The meal was nothing special really, it was on a similar level to what Johanna would have cooked for herself over a flame back when she lived in the shed. Wild turkey, potatoes, some greens and the highlight, a few deserts that were brought out from the train.

The gifts were handed over and whilst the camera crew were setting up for the departure shot of the walk to the train, Johnna handed over and explained the uses of the Aloe Vera. She left the little notebooks in both Haymitch and Madge Undersee’s hands and called it a day.

That visit had been exhausting but District Eleven would no doubt be far far worse.

She wasn’t looking forward to meeting Taro’s family, even if she had promised him that she would donate half her first year’s winnings to them. No amount of money would make up for losing Taro.

Would they look like him?

Hooded eyes and dark skin. Sharp smiles and sharper wit.

Would they be crying?

Their tears bared to all of Panem.

Like show-ponies. 

She couldn’t think about it.

—

The journey to Eleven took a coastal route, around the east-most border of eight and with views of the ocean out the left windows. 

It also took far less time than she was hoping for. 

They were to, yet again, stay on the train overnight a few hundred meters down the track from the station so that the camera crew already stationed in Eleven could get a shot in the morning of the train coming in and Johanna getting off fully dressed in her parade outfit.

They had pulled into a tunnel so the views out of the windows were just brick walls and the food available on the train was more a collection of pictures suggesting a full meal than anything of substance, so Johanna had commandeered the kitchen and was busy making a more meat-heavy pasta for her and Blight. 

She wasn’t getting any sleep tonight so she may as well do something with her time.

She took to the lounge carriage and gutted it. The same way she gutted it before her games. Knives lined har pockets and she was in sweats. At least this way she might get a bit of rest in between her sets of exercise.

She might even be able to build back the bulk she had around her waist. 

The arse and tits were permanent unless she could get them surgically removed but the waist was just skin. Tight skin with no fat deposits underneath. But still skin.

She started a set of modified crunches, where every time she lifted off the ground, she would fling a knife at the wall with enough force for it to stick.

It was going to be a long night.

—

Morning found Johanna altering the dress Sparrow had sent for her.

The stylist had left a few sewing kits and a machine for her team to use in her absence in case Johanna’s measurements had changed and she had appropriated all of it. The original dress was layers and layers of white fabric pleated and twisted into a huge skirt and gathered top. It was one of the more revealing options with the fact it was backless and the front plunged almost to her bellybutton. There were flowers embroidered under folds and layers that would reveal themselves whenever she moved. 

She kept the flower idea but changed the type of flower that was used. Sunflower switched to spiderlily, marigold into hydrangea, the soft leaves were switched for thistle spikes. Finally she dotted gladiolus into the spaces she had missed. 

Then came the idea behind the change.

She pulled out a small container of ruby coloured gemstones and got to work.

—

“...thankful for her joy and her optimism. But more than that, I wanted to thank you for her laughter. Ally was the best of us in that arena, and i’ll owe her for being such a bright spot in the experience for the rest of my life…”

Blight watched with a detached sort of horror and Johanna bled out on stage.

Not literally.

But sje was absolutely bleeding something.

He just wasn’t sure if it was emotions or audacity.

The dress - that he had been gushed about by Toddrick, one of the male prep team boys - was supposed to blend in with the plantlife and the colours of the fields and agriculture. It did no such thing.

Somehow, between last night and this morning, the dress had gone from a summer wedding dream to what amounted to a dissertation on grief and hatred.

Johanna was stood on stage dressed for a wedding in a dress stained red. 

The flowers would have been fine if not for what they represented. But the rubies. 

Rubies poured from a wound stitched out of clumped and crumpled flowers and thorny leaves. They dangled from invisible threads and sparkled in the clear skies of the district. 

The crowd were eating it up.

The speech was as appropriate as they could hope for from her, especially given who the people she was speaking to were.

She was just finishing up her segment on Almond and her smile was straining visibly by the time she switched tracks. 

“Taro though, Taro was mine.”

Oh fucking hell.

She had been given a few pointers for her speech and had seemingly followed them.

Thank the Capitol.

Thank the Districts for their tributes.

Glorify the games. 

A few short words for the individual tributes to spice it up a little.

Rinse.

Repeat.

Or at least that's what it should have been. 

It wasn’t necessary that it be written in that exact order but Johanna had put together an intro that she was planning to reuse for the whole tour before deviating for the short words segment.

His mistake for not checking what she wrote.

Won’t happen again.

“There are stories about red strings and souls cleaved in half and divided between two bodies. If souls exist then Taro had all of mine. He had all of it and he died with all of it. All I can hope to pray for is that he treats it kindly in the next life. Because he was the sun of my orbit in this one. When I was shipped of for the games I had prepared myself for a struggle and a slaughter, I did not think to prepare to meet my brother. Because he was my brother in every way that one can be without blood.”

She paused for breath and Blight took a moment to check on the Yamaska family. The only woman on the stage was being held up like a doll by the two large boys on either side of her. She was heaving and gushing huge, horrible tears that he couldn’t bear to look at for too long. The boys though, each and every one of them had a hand on their heart and they seemed to be looking at Johanna like it they looked hard enough she would stop being real.

There was a quiet sort of reverence for the girl who was all but screaming on stage. 

She was doing what very few before her had dared, humanising the tributes, giving them names and referring to them only by their names. She didn’t say ‘thank you for your contribution’ she said ‘thank you for their smiles and their words and their hearts’. Johanna Mason had torn her heart out and propped it up ona pedestal, daring the world to look at it, dissect it, pull it apart. 

All they would find was her rage.

Her eyes had sharpened and her mouth opened and he wasn’t hearing a word of it. 

The peacekeepers, beacons in their bright white against a sea of brown, shuffled slightly in their places but thankfully, miraculously, stood still when the whole district seemed to swell and burst like a tide against rock.

Johanna had reiterated the promise that she made to Taro. Half of her income for as long as she lived was going to his family. It was certainly more than they promised each other in the games and these people knew it.

Eleven was a sleeping lion who had just reared its head to remind the world of their numbers, of the largeness of their people. 

District Eleven roared as Johanna bowed her theatre bow at the front of the stage.

—

“You don’t do nothin’ by halves, do ya girlie?”

Chaff was slumped against the bar, raising a glass of amber liquid in her general direction. His eyes were cloudy but his smile was as sharp as any blade.

Seeder was equally pleased it seemed, lounging against the backrest of a sofa, rolling her shoulders like a jaguar. “We all know what you promised in the arena but we weren’t sure that you would go through with it. Suffice to say you exceeded expectations doll.”

She wasn’t looking at Johanna though. She was looking out the window at the cheering and the children’s laughter outside. 

A few members of the camera crew were arguing with the head peacekeeper of the district whilst the rest got a few sneaky shots of the revelry in for the montage. 

“I rarely get to see the district so happy, it’s usually more common at the end of the season on really good years to have a harvest festival. The tour is a far less appreciated tradition.”

Seeder turned to meet Johanna’s eyes. “Thank you, I don’t know what happened to you that you feel so secure but you’re taking a risk regardless and I appreciate it. We all do.”

“Nothing and no-one.” Johanna mumbled. “I have nothing and no-one. The only person who could be punished for my perceived crimes is me.”

The conversation drifted into a solemn silence. 

They had their victory lunch (though banquet would have been a better term considering the amount of foods available) and departed for the tour.

What a day.

Chapter Text

Johanna couldn’t claim to have had much interaction with the kids from Districts 10 through 5. It showed quite a bit during her speeches. They were all impersonal and dull and exactly what their supreme dictator/overlord was expecting. The speeches were there to incentivise the stupid and demoralise the educated.

She was being shown off as the murderer or the survivor of their children.

And every family, regardless of what she was saying, was imagining their kids in her place.

It became more and more obvious the lower the number became that the districts saw less and less of the truth of the capitol.

People in Six clapped when she got off the train like she was there to collect an award.

She wore a dress made of only golden railroad tracks and sprigs of thrift flowers peeking through their cracks. 

People in Five asked for autographs.

She signed them with a plastic smile, in a plastic outfit fitted with plasticky wiring. It lit up green and cast her face in a sickly pale hue.

So now here she was on the train in Four trying to keep it together. 

Four were careers.

Four glorified the games and sent their kids to a pseudo-academy where they teach equal amounts of PE, combat and survival/strategy lessons as they do regular lessons. 

Four draft their victors into volunteer teaching positions for as many days as they can get away with to skirt around the Victor Laws that prohibit them from having a job or earning money outside of their victor dividends and services in the Capitol.

And she was going out there to promote the slaughter of those children.

Kids like Reif or Annie who undoubtedly believed The Games to be actual games. Something for personal glory and not just glorified slaughter. Who realized what was happening and buckled under the weight of their parent’s choices and their president's psycopathy.

The victors tour is insidious that way. It serves as an example to the ‘lower’ districts, stay in line or else the best you can hope for is that your kids will be as damaged and unstable as this one and at worst they’ve been killed by this one. But it’s propoganda to the ‘higher’ districts. Here is a victor who will now be set for life in a mansion and become a celebrity for the Capitol, she’s almost one of us isn’t that brilliant? Dont you want that to be you?  

She didn’t even want to be her.

The train slowed to a stop and her heart felt like lead.

Here goes nothing.

The smell of sea-salt and fish hit her first. It was almost a slap in the face how pungent it was. She could hardly imagine the blonde, tanned, model-esque Finnick bathed in this sort of stench.

She was dragging her feet slightly as Tish inserted some tiny nose plugs into her own nose whilst directing her to the door of the train carriage.

The walkway was blinding. She was glad that Tish had the forethought to walk out with her because she was still blinking the camera flash from her eyes when she was nearing the steps up to the platform.

There was Reif.

Without the blood pouring from his eye socket and the puncture in his neck and the onset of rigor mortis as she spent ime carving and scratching her artwork into the stone tablet.

He glared down at her like he could set her on fire with his eyes.

She looked away.

Everywhere she looked, other people’s eyes met hers.

She couldn’t escape them.

She swallowed down the bile on the back of her tongue and pushed forwards.

Her mouth kept moving and the speech fell from her lips as rehearsed but she stumbled over the newer section as her eyes flitted from person to person trying to find somebody, anybody, who wasn’t staring at her like that.

With the sort of reverence reserved for a hero.

—

She imagined, distantly, how Finnick must’ve felt. 

He had been made to mentor kids older than himself from the age of fourteen. 

He was still blatantly shackled by the Capitol. So much so that she wondered if he had any family left at all or if he had lost siblings or parents to examples of the lengths the President would go to not allow for another Lucy Grey.

Lucy was put in a pen, carted around like cattle.

Snow had glamourised it, covering it behind a warped pane forged of crystal and opulence, but chains were still chains and bars were still bars. 

Only these bars were carved out of bone.

They were still in chains, only, their chains were no longer made of metal, they were flesh and blood. Their chains were made of children.

She had read the Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood back when she was still in secondary school. 

Would it be too obvious a reference for her to wear the red robe and white ‘wings’. 

She put the idea on the backburner.

District four looks like home but also not.

She was raised in Mousehole by her nana who was one of nine kids and the only daughter. All of her older brothers worked the same fishing boat in shifts to provide for the family. 

District Four looked like it was desperately trying to show quaint fishing village vibes but was immediately and obviously lacking once you looked at any part of it too long.

There were far too many boats and none had engines. They were just houses built along the coast in rows and rows connected by rickety little gangplanks and walkways.

She was guided away from the over-water residential area and towards the gateway of some sort of holiday resort. 

She had to blink a few times. 

Of course the capitol would use Four as a seaside paradise, why wouldn’t they?

Did the people of Four gather in the fucking resort for their names to be drawn?

Associating the games with the luxury of the Capitol from the get go, no wonder Four became a career district. Its people would have spent their mornings in shabby waterlogged boats, probably surrounded by sickness, what with having people in such close quarters, and then having them walk through the huge golden gates of the resort to allow one ‘lucky winner’ to get reaped or volunteer their way into a chance at living like the capitolites do. 

It was more real for them in a way. Whilst Twelve Eleven and Ten were arguably the most clear sighted in terms of the realities of the games, the reward for the games is actively flaunted in the faces of the people of Four.

It was no wonder both Annie and Finnick volunteered.

Which boats were thiers? Did they Even live on boats or were they more involved in the capitol facing side? Did they live in the tightly packed cottages on land? Did they have parents or know people who had parents who worked as staff in the resort? 

Or did they watch from a distance as glamorous trains rolled up bearing outlandishly lavish characters who ate as much as they could only to vomit it straight back up just to keep eating? Did they sit on the rotting docks and listen to the music and the festivities and the wealth of the people just a few meters away?

She gave her speech again. Only this time, she told the story of the little mermaid. The original story in which mermaids did not have souls and instead turned to sea foam and were completely erased from the memory of the other sealife. She wove a story about how Reif was not a mermaid, he was a boy, and boys could be remembered. She spoke of holding him in their hearts as though she had not ended his life herself. 

She remembered his blood running red lines down the stone slab as she carved the images out around him. 

There was no honour in what she was doing; no remorse. She had used him as a symbol of humanity by treating him like a tool. 

Tributes do not show compassion for other tributes unless it was a mutual pact to not kill the other of your own district - if only to avoid the isolation and the hatred when you return home.

But she did. She used Reif and she used Ally and Burleigh and Taro and she felt no remorse, only a detached sense of satisfaction that those children, her children, would live on forever if she had any say at all.

—

Finnick was barely clothed. 

Nobody seemed to be wearing a full outfit at all actually.

Finnick was down a shirt, Annie’s dress was see-through, the numerous nameless boys behind them were in various high-fashion-esque takes on speedos and jockstraps. Mags was the only one even slightly appropriate but even then the dress she wore was form fitting. 

She doubted somehow that even District One would be acting like this. 

She herself was in a floorlength gown but the top was made of bleached coral and netting. There was a nipple cover on a singular partially-exposed breast but other than that she was tits to the wind.

She wanted to crawl in a hole and die.

The dress was beautiful, made of a number of gorgeous deep blues and whites that didn’t look too cold against her warmer toned skin and darker colouring. She definitely didn’t look like she was from four, the population was almost alarmingly aryan in colouring. And most seemed to be wearing repurposed sheets as chitons and dresses. She wondered if they had a theme or if that was just how Four was, your clothes would get ruined anyway so why waste time stitching them together when you could just wrap yourself in a sheet and save on both money and time?

The tour was longer than expected, instead of a late luch they managed to make it back in time for dinner. The tour started at the resort, they filed through waterparks and lounges and activity centers and regular pools and spas and then walked out the back of the resort, through another massive gate, into the Victor’s housing area.

She knew the design of that had to be purposeful, it was likely the same for the other career spots, to give the capitolites such easy access to the victors that they make a point of buying and using.

Disgusting.

She watched as Annie was pulled into Mags’ side and Finnick’s smile flickered when he caught her eye. She saw the other victors, the boys, all hunch down slightly as they passed through the gateway as though it was pressing down on them.

She never thought to be grateful for coming from Seven, but at least their Capitol Resort was a mountainous hiking/forest wellness retreat style fixture that had them situated well outside of the city limits.

The tour dredged on and they were shown to the private beach used by the residents of the victor’s space though it was heavily implied through all the loaded glances that it was far less private than the guide was making it out to be. A large fence ran around the whole area cutting through a section of sea about a mile out and wrapping around to the side of the resort. 

She took a quick glance around and yep, sure enough, she saw the huge windows of what she assumed to be more expensive rooms pointed directly at the beach. It was like thye were in a huge fishbowl.

Creepy Capitol creepers.

One of the other male victors caught her eye, twitched a little like he was suppressing a flinch and then nodded slightly.

She saw red.

Claudette was waffling around with a production manager but when she turned to him fully tensed with her hands in fists she could almost see him go white underneath his fake tan.

She stormed straight past him grabbing both him and the producer by their wrists and dragged them into a slightly more isolated part of the beach.

“You want drama, an angle to play up or whatever.” Her gaze was firmly on the producer who looked lost but nodded obligingly. “I’ve got a few lines you can use.”

—

The banquet hall was a cathedral of excess.

Johanna had thought District Eleven’s spread was lavish, but Four was… obscene. Whole roasted swordfish gleamed under chandeliers shaped like crashing waves. Platters of oysters and mussels spilled open with pearls tucked between the shells as if someone thought they were garnishes instead of treasures. Waiters glided around with trays of cocktails that fizzed neon blue, rimmed with sea-salt like it was some cute inside joke.

She wondered if anyone in this room had ever even gutted a fish themselves.

Her seat was flanked by Finnick on one side and Annie on the other. Claudette was already yammering at a cameraman about angles, her beaded shawl shimmering as she gestured like she was conducting an orchestra.

Finnick leaned close, voice a velvet drawl meant to be overheard.

“Smile, sweetheart. You’ll wrinkle if you scowl like that.”

She gave him her teeth in a smile that promised blood.

“You’d know about wrinkles, wouldn’t you? Must be exhausting, keeping up this pretty-boy act twenty-four seven.”

His laugh was light and practiced, but there was an edge in his eyes. “You wound me. And here I thought you might enjoy the view.”

He tilted his head so the light struck just right, catching the cut of his jaw. The crowd behind them tittered, mistaking their sparring for flirtation. Maybe it was, a little. Maybe he liked that she didn’t swoon. Maybe she liked that he could take a punch, verbal or otherwise.

She reached for her wine glass and clinked it against his.

“Cheers to surviving. Let’s see how long we both keep it up.”

Annie’s hand brushed Johanna’s arm as she set down her own glass. The touch was feather-light, grounding. Her eyes weren’t on the cameras or the Capitol guests but on Johanna herself, earnest and unblinking.

“You don’t have to drink if you don’t want to,” Annie murmured, almost drowned out by the music. “They won’t notice.”

Johanna blinked. For a second, she forgot the stage lights and the reporters scribbling notes about her dress. Annie’s voice had been so soft, so normal. Like something her nana might’ve said.

“I’ve survived worse than a little wine,” Johanna said, though she loosened her grip on the stem.

Dinner blurred into a parade of dishes — spiced crab claws, silver bowls of caviar, steak so tender it practically dissolved. She barely tasted any of it. She was too busy watching Finnick trade smiles with every Capitolite who caught his eye, and too aware of the way Annie sat quiet, untouched food in front of her, tracing the condensation on her glass like she was trying to vanish into the pattern.

Halfway through, Finnick leaned in again, lips brushing just by her ear.

“Careful. They’ll think you’re jealous.”

She rolled her eyes but let the corner of her mouth twitch upward.

“Please. If I wanted you, you’d know. You’d be begging me to stop.”

His laugh startled Annie into looking up, and for a heartbeat, all three of them were caught in the same fragile bubble of not-performing. Not-Capitol. Just… people.

It popped as soon as the music swelled, dancers flooding the center of the hall with nets of glitter and silk. The crowd roared.

Johanna drained her glass.

The first notes hit like a slap.

Not the stately Capitol strings Johanna was used to on this cursed tour, but something rowdy and off-kilter. It was all fiddles and pipes tangled with a pounding drumbeat that rattled the pearl chandeliers. It was supposed to be a sea shanty, she realized, though it sounded like it had been scrubbed and perfumed for Capitol ears. No grit, no salt, just a polished version of men yelling on boats turned into “dinner theater.”

The crowd howled with delight.

Capitolites and victors alike spilled onto the dance floor, swaying like waves, partners changing with every few beats. Some carried nets strung with sequins instead of fish, tossing them overhead so glitter rained down like scales. A troupe of boys dressed like sailors (shirtless, naturally) stomped in formation, singing call-and-response lines that had more to do with champagne and conquests than the ocean.

Johanna smirked into her glass.

Of course. Even their shanties were fake.

Finnick didn’t miss his cue. He stood, extended a hand, and grinned that grin that could buy and sell souls. She almost told him to shove it. But the cameras were circling, hungry for a shot, and Claudette was practically vibrating with anticipation.

“Fine,” Johanna muttered, slamming back her wine before taking his hand.

He pulled her into the fray with ridiculous ease, spinning her so fast she nearly toppled into a pile of silk nets. His arm slid around her waist - firm, practiced, perfectly timed to look intimate without actually being so. The crowd ate it up, shrieking approval as if the two of them were some star-crossed lovers meeting in the middle of a storm.

“Smile wider,” he teased under his breath.

“Bite me.”

“Maybe later,” he shot back, flashing that Capitol-perfect smirk.

She laughed despite herself - sharp, ugly, genuine - and for a second, it almost worked. They looked like they belonged in the performance.

But when the fiddles screeched and the crowd whooped, her eyes caught Annie’s.

Annie wasn’t dancing. She stood at the edge, dress catching the light, hair loose and bright against her pale shoulders. She wasn’t watching Finnick. She wasn’t watching Johanna’s gown or the cameras or the Capitolites dripping with pearls. She was watching Johanna’s face. Only that.

Johanna faltered on a step. Finnick covered it by spinning her again, sending her skirts flying, but she felt the moment snag in her chest.

When the song finally collapsed into applause and shouting, she slipped out of Finnick’s grasp and crossed the edge of the floor, pretending to chase a drink. Instead she found Annie.

“Not your thing?” Johanna asked, jerking her chin toward the chaos.

Annie shook her head. She was smiling, but not with her mouth; just this faint glow in her eyes. “It’s too loud. The sea doesn’t sound like that.”

Johanna barked a laugh. “No. The sea sounds like it wants to kill you. At least the sea is honest about it.”

They drifted toward the balcony, away from the music. The doors opened to a sweep of dark water, moonlight carving silver paths over the waves. For the first time all day, Johanna could breathe without choking on perfume and salt-polished spectacle.

Annie leaned on the railing, bare arms pale in the lamplight. “When I was little,” she said quietly, “my father used to sing real songs. Not like that in there. Working songs.”

Johanna tilted her head. “And what did they sound like?”

Annie’s voice was low, almost swallowed by the surf, but steady. She hummed a tune, simple, raw, without accompaniment. It wasn’t pretty, but it had a weight to it.

Johanna found herself gripping the railing too tightly. Something in her chest twisted. She wanted to make a joke, to scoff, but she couldn’t. The sound cracked her open in a way no Capitol pageantry ever could. It was startlingly homey. It felt like the sailors at the docks in Cornwall performing through their laughter as a young brown eyed girl with coloured string braided through her hair begged for a ‘sea song’.

“You’ll get yourself in trouble singing like that,” Johanna muttered.

Annie finally smiled - really smiled, wide and bright and almost childlike. “Then I’ll sing quieter.”

For a moment, the world was just the two of them, sea air and starlight pressing in. No cameras. No shanties. Just Annie’s song in the back of Johanna’s skull, echoing like a heartbeat.

The shanty finally wound down into applause and shrieking, sequins raining down from nets. Capitolites clapped their jeweled hands together like they’d just witnessed culture instead of butchery.

Johanna had a drink in her fist and Annie’s humming still buzzing under her skin. Something in her snapped.

She set the glass down, strode toward the stage, and before Claudette could flail his jeweled arms or the producer could choke on his pearl choker, Johanna had snatched the mic clean from the sailor-boy singer’s hand.

“Alright,” she said, voice ringing sharp through the hall. “If you’re going to call that a shanty, you might as well hear a real one.”

The room went silent in that thick, expectant way that told her they thought this was still part of the show. 

Perfect.

She cleared her throat, squared her shoulders, and let her nana’s voice rise up from the back of her memory. A song of hauling nets, of bodies breaking under waves, of fish guts and storms and hunger. Her voice was low, rougher than it used to be - but steady. It carried.

“What will we do with a drunken sailor?
What will we do with a drunken sailor?”

The rhythm stamped itself out on the floor under her boots. The sailors who’d been playing at dancing froze, then slowly started stomping along - less choreography, more instinct. The fiddler caught on and scraped a raw line under her voice.

“We’ll put him in a long boat ‘til he’s sober,
Put him in a long boat ‘til he’s sober”

Her words weren’t pretty. They were coarse, filled with sea-brine and calluses, a reminder that the ocean was work and blood and survival, not a Capitol holiday backdrop. But the hall leaned forward anyway, Capitolites wide-eyed like she’d just performed sorcery.

She belted the final verse, felt the song rattle her ribcage and surge out of her like a tide:

“Way hay and up she rises,
Early in the mornin’!”

When she let the silence fall, it was thick and strange. No polite applause this time. Just a stunned beat before the room erupted - cheers, shrieks, demands for more. Cameras flashed like lightning. Claudette was visibly flushed with joy.

Johanna handed the mic back to the stunned sailor-boy and walked off like nothing had happened. She caught Finnick’s smirk; impressed despite himself; but she didn’t stop there.

She went straight to Annie.

“ That was a shanty,” Johanna muttered, sinking into the chair beside her and stealing a roll off Annie’s untouched plate.

Annie was staring at her like she’d grown gills. But then, slowly, her lips curled into a smile — a real one, not the Capitol kind. She leaned closer, voice trembling but warm. “My father used to sing that one, the lyrics were a little different though.”

Johanna froze mid-bite. She looked at Annie, really looked at her. The salt air clung to Annie’s hair, her dress catching the candlelight, her eyes brighter than anything in the room.

Something in Johanna’s chest loosened.

“Huh, it traveled farther than I thought it had,” she said.

Annie laughed, soft, surprised. “You sounded like home.”

And for the first time since this cursed tour began, Johanna felt like she wasn’t performing at all.

—

The banquet was still roaring when Claudette finally cornered her.

“Darling, darling! That was divine! Spontaneous! Unfiltered!” His voice was sharp and high, like a violin string pulled too tight. His jacket glittered with sequined seashells, his moustache waxed to perfect curls that bobbed when he gestured. “The Capitol will eat it up!”

Johanna smiled with her teeth, nodded once, and slipped away before the jeweled wasp of a man could pin her to the wall with more praise.

She didn’t make it back to the train.

Finnick caught her at the door like he’d been waiting. “Leaving without me? That would be rude.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“True. But I know how to slip through where the guards aren’t watching.”

Behind him, Annie was already hovering by the archway, half in shadow, like she’d decided to follow the second Johanna moved. Johanna tilted her chin toward her in silent invitation. Annie’s hand tightened on her skirt, then she nodded.

The three of them slipped down a narrow side corridor, past kitchens where steam and sweat smelled a hell of a lot more like real work than the ballroom ever would. Finnick led them through a side gate, tossing a wink at the servant who pretended not to see. And then - there it was.

The beach.

The fence loomed out in the dark, ugly and metal, slicing the water into a neat square. But the waves still came, indifferent, pulling at the sand with their endless drag. The moon lit the surface in streaks of silver. It smelled like salt and rot and brine.

Johanna kicked off her heels immediately, toes curling in the wet sand. “Finally,” she muttered, voice low. “Something that doesn’t stink of perfume.”

Annie laughed a thin, bright sound, shaky like she didn’t do it often. She bent, slipping her own feet free, and waded in just enough to let the surf touch her ankles. Her skirt dragged heavy in the water.

Finnick lounged back against a rock like the cover of some magazine, arms folded behind his head, every inch the golden boy. “You know they’ll drag us back any minute, right?”

“Then we make that minute worth it.” Johanna crouched, scooping a handful of wet sand, letting it run through her fingers like time she couldn’t stop. “This is the only real thing I’ve touched in days.”

Annie looked up at her, eyes catching the moonlight. “We used to play a game. Me and my brothers. Who could stand in the waves longest without falling. You can’t fight the water, it always wins, but you can try to bend.”

Finnick made a soft sound with the back of his throat. “That’s the truth of it, isn’t it? Bend until you break.”

Johanna glanced at him. For a second, his Capitol smile had cracked, edges raw. He looked their age then. Just a boy who’d been swallowed up too fast.

The waves hissed in and out, whispering against the sand. Annie’s dress clung wet to her knees, her hair whipping loose in the wind. Finnick’s eyes were fixed on the horizon like he could see an escape carved into the line between water and sky.

Johanna suddenly, fiercely, wished she could bottle this moment. Keep it. Three broken kids on a stolen scrap of beach, away from cameras and applause, away from speeches and blood and eyes. Just here. 

She dug her toes deeper into the sand and let the tide rush up over her ankles, cold as fuck but familiar.

“Alright,” she said. “Who’s up for your little game, Annie?”

Annie blinked, startled. Then she smiled, wide and sudden, like a crack of sunlight. She grabbed Johanna’s hand without hesitation. Finnick groaned but pushed himself upright, brushing little bits of the rock he’d been leaning on from his bare bicep.

And when the next wave rolled in, the three of them stood side by side, feet braced, daring the ocean to knock them down.

They waded up to her thighs in cold ocean water.

It hit harder than she thought it would, foaming up to their waists. Annie’s laugh cracked high as she toppled sideways, clutching at Johanna’s arm and dragging her under too. Finnick went down like a felled mast, cursing saltwater between gulps of it, and when Johanna came up she was choking and spitting, hair plastered flat, eyes stinging, gown a sodden anchor around her legs.

But Annie was laughing, Finnick was grinning like a boy who hadn’t yet been sold, and Johanna; god help her; felt her throat split with laughter too.

It didn’t last of course.

Peacekeepers were on them quick, barking orders, hauling them away from the waves like they were misbehaving dogs. Claudette stormed behind, moustache quivering, sequined jacket blinding in the moonlight as he flapped and fumed. “Scandalous! Ruined fabrics, ruined schedule, ruined! Do you have any idea what saltwater does to this kind of netting?” He was louder than the gulls, but Johanna barely heard him. The sea was still roaring in her ears.

By the time they were shoved up the steps of the train, her gown dripped steady puddles onto the polished floor, every strand of hair hanging in tangles. She was still shivering, but only out of spite.

That’s where Tilly found her.

The woman stood waiting in the entry compartment, arms folded tight across a pale tunic stitched with subtle golden threads. Her eyes flicked down once to the pool of seawater forming under Johanna’s feet, then up to the bedraggled tangle of seaweed clinging to her hair.

“Oh, sweetheart.” Tilly’s sigh wasn’t angry - not even disappointed. Just weary, like she’d been waiting for this exact moment since District Seven. She plucked a towel from a neat stack by the door, flicked it open with a snap, and wrapped it over Johanna’s shoulders before she could shake her off. “You’ll catch your death like this.”

Johanna snorted, voice still rough with brine. “Death would be a mercy.”

Tilly ignored her, crouching to peel off the ruined shoes, setting them aside with quiet care. “Well,” she said lightly, “at least the fish got a show tonight too.”

And Johanna, sodden and raw, barked a laugh that tore in her throat, sharp as salt, before slumping onto the chaise lounge.

“District three tomorrow then?”

Tilly looked over, visibly huffing after dragging the majority of the skirt into a bucket at the foot of the sofa, “Please don’t try to drown yourself in Three.”

“No promises.”