A/N: Yay, Johanna Mason is theme 11!
Disclaimer: I don't own the Hunger Games.
11. Blood
When I was five years old, I saw blood for the first time that I can remember. It was all over my baby brother for only a few seconds. The midwife wiped it off, but I can still see it if I strain my mind. Red and bright and striking.
I saw it for the second time when I was seven. That was the first year I watched the Games. I didn't mean to – I got up at night because I heard the screams from the television room, and I stumbled out in my nightgown to the fireballs spurting across the screen. My father grabbed me and hurried me back down the hall, to the safety of bed, but I'd already seen it.
My third sight of blood came at thirteen years old. That was the year that I fully understood the weight of a birthday, after my friend was Reaped and she stuck herself with a needle. I did the same and we pressed our wrists together, so that we'd always have a little bit of each other. Turns out that I've got the only piece of her that anyone ever found.
The fourth time I saw blood, I was fifteen. My name was called. That whole week was a haze until the bloodbath started, and everything fountained red. The month that followed was nothing but maroon and vermillion and every shade of fiery sunset imaginable.
The fifth and last time, the blood belonged to my brother. The same one who introduced me to the fluid. It spurted from his chest and stained the spear and the ground and the screen and my eyes. I didn't watch for the rest of his Games. They really were his, even though he lost.
I guess I looked at blood after that, but I never really saw it. Even now that the war's over, I can watch people die and it doesn't phase me. Not anymore. Something broke in me when Oak died and the blood isn't as bright, as shocking any longer. It's just what it is. Nothing to be scared of.
Nobody asks me what I am afraid of, though. And I'm not going to tell you. Because me, Johanna Mason? The Victor of District 7?
I'm not supposed to be afraid of anything. Least of all the absence of blood.
