A/N: first fic here but it's only a drabble I wrote to kill time. Please leave a review if you enjoyed thanks!
Her screams echo around their tiny dilapidated neighborhood.
"Mama! Wake up!"
A little girl sees her beloved mama sleeping, but if she's sleeping why won't she just wake up? She turns to her father, who has tears streaming down her face. It's the first time the child has seen her papa cry.
Her wailing goes unanswered and it is the first time four year old Johanna experiences loss.
The feeling comes back in two days when she finds her papa hanging by a rope in that same dingy house.
Seven year old Johanna adores her older brother. He is funny and happy and kind and she worships him.
He teaches her how to hold an axe for the first time. She teaches him about magic in the trees but tells him with tears in her pretty eyes that it can't bring mama and papa back from above.
He teaches her how to take care of baby sister, who came right before mama and papa went away. He teaches her not to question the scary people who have guns that go bang and loud voices that makes her feel scared. He teaches her that it's okay to cry.
Seven year old Johanna loves twelve year old Asher, and even though she missed her mama singing her to sleep and her papa telling her silly stories she is happy.
The happiness goes away when Johanna is twelve and Asher is reaped for the 68th Hunger Games.
She thinks that maybe Ash might have a chance. He's big and strong. He can fight. Johanna tells him that when she goes to see him before the train takes him away.
He laughs and says, "If you say so."
Ash promises Johanna that he'll come back home.
He does so, weeks later, in a coffin.
Johanna is fifteen when her name is reaped from the bowl.
She cries for the first time since Ash died, ugly and pitiful sobs broadcasted over the entirety of Panem.
She tells her sister Amy that she loves her and promises her she'll come back alive.
She makes the same promises to Amy the same promises Ash made to her just three years ago and the moment the doors close behind her beloved little sister Johanna starts to act.
Johanna cries a lot after that. It's all an act but nobody knows that, not even her stupid mentors and her stupid stylist. Nobody sees through her weak little mask
She takes off her mask in the arena, staining her hidden face with the bloody handprints of the people she's murdered.
The girl from eight, the boy from four, the girl from one and finally she ends it when her axe buries itself into the skull of the girl from two.
That's it, Johanna thinks, it's over.
It's never over and she learns it the hard way.
She says no to pimping her body out. The games had ended, they couldn't do anything to her after they made her killer, right?
Wrong.
Johanna Mason is fifteen years old when she buries her sister, dead with an axe to the skull.
Johanna Mason is fifteen years old when she cries for the last time.
Johanna Mason is fifteen years old when her world is crumbling before her eyes.
And the only thing she can do is cry like her heart is breaking one last time before the walls around her blood stained heart close off to the rest of the world.