Johanna Mason is a very pretty young woman, but she never ever imagined how that could play out against her. She'd won and had had a smirk on her face when she held up the bloodied hatchet to the sounds of the victory trumpet.
"How sick," the nurse stitching up the gash on her calf had said when she was just half-conscious, slipping away under anesthesia. The nurse continued, "Tricking everybody like that. Simply dispicable."
Johanna was sure she wasn't dispicable. Bitter, yes. Annoying, yes. Clever, yes. But dispicable? She still laughed at the very thought of it. She was totally radiantly gorgeous, too, as Caesar Flickerman had noted. She'd curled back up in her seat and smiled awkwardly.
She had played them all like a record, and they were simply too stupid to have noticed. She did it all the time - at home, at school, at the park. She was almost sixteen but small for her age, petite but deadly as she'd laughed about in her interview after winning, when she was bitter and angry, no reminiscience of herself from two weeks before. That was just the way she was.
So, the day after her victory tour, Snow didn't approach her like her mentor, Lucy, had warned her about. And she was okay with it. Lucy said only the ugly didn't get forced into prositution, and Johanna already knew she wasn't ugly, so she was totally fine with it.
But then he did. The day after her first mentoring job was done and when Lucy was dead and gone at the age of sixty-four. Her tribute, Dallas, was dead too, at the tender age of fourteen. It didn't really bother her - Dallas had been outspoken and rude - simply a brat.
Snow had said, "Did Lucy tells you what happens to the pretty Victors?" Then pursed his thin, purple-tinged lips.
"Yes, and I don't very well imagine it applies to me," she said, folding her arms over her chest. After all, she wasn't even seventeen, and Lucy had been almost nineteen when Snow had spoken to her.
"It does, Miss Mason. There's nothing special about you except maybe a little bit of smartness." The words stung, but she sat up straighter and rolled her eyes.
"I don't care. I'm smarter than the rest of them and I'm smarter than you. There's nothing you can do to make me," she said a little louder.
"Johanna Abigayle Mason. Victor of the seventy-second Hunger Games. Aged sixteen. Brother, Aster. Mother, Katalyna. Father, Orwell. Sister, S-"
"Stop it," she said forcefully, slamming a hand on the table.
"Sister, Salem," he started again. "That's a short list of people we can hurt, kill, if you refuse the deal."
"I'm saying no. I won't do it."
"Miss Mason, you have no idea how valuable a victor can be to the Capitolites."
"I'm not becoming a prostitute and that's that," she said firmly, turning and leaving the room. The glass in the door shook as she darted back up the stairs to the seventh floor of the Training Center, where her partner in mentoring, Aiden Rosenbloom, was sitting on the table. He was almost thirty, an old soul for mentoring.
"Snow wanted you to be a prostitute, I reckon. Bit late for the asking," he said in his almost-Capitol accent. Did victors spend so much time in the Capitol if they said yes that their accents changed?
"Yes, and I said no. He doesn't have the gut to kill my family. He doesn't have the gut to kill anyone."
"Johanna, he does. I said no. I don't have a father anymore," he said, raising his voice as he kept talking. "You need to go down there and say yes. Your virginity is not as important as your parents' life."
She squirmed at the word. Johanna didn't much like talking about sex. "I'm not that weak, Aiden. They just aren't going to make me. I don't care. And it's not about that," she shot back.
Aiden sighed. "Fine, but don't blame me when you go back home next week and there are two and a half bodies lined up on your kitchen table."
"Two and a half?" she scoffed, folding her arms angrily over her chest.
"He'll chop your sister into two pieces and store one in the fridge." The words played angrily on his tongue as he shot a look at Johanna then left the room.
She really didn't think Snow had the guts to do a god damned thing.
x-x-x
She went home eight days later, and, sure enough, the barely-recognizable but neatly-cut top half of her brother was sat neatly on the kitchen table. She had shut them out and she didn't live with any of them, but she knew where they were: In their modest five-room house on Emory Street, all bawling their eyes out.
It was going to be okay. Johanna didn't care much for the boy anyway, always teasing her and yelling and whining. Salem and her parents were a different story, but they were still okay. Now that Snow had killed her brother, he would stop there. He didn't have the guts to go any further.
Every week, she would say no. No because she didn't want to. No because it wasn't worth it.
Snow appeared in her office on every Monday when she came back from the market with fresh nuts and herbs for the week's meals. Seasoning was very important to Johanna - you had to spice up your dishes or it just would taste all the same. You had to spice up your life or it would all feel the same. Killing your brother wasn't the best way to do that, but it didn't matter. Not yet.
He said the same things. "Johanna, I'm warning you." "Johanna, your family will pay the price." "Johanna, dire consequences." "Johanna, the Capitolites want you."
And she said the same things. "I'm worth more than that." "You wouldn't." "I don't care how much they want me, god damnit. My answer is no."
And then there'd be a body, or maybe half a body on her kitchen table three days later, when she came back from her grandmother's house.
The last time she came back from her grandmother's house, it was her mother. Before that, her father. And before him, it was her cousins, both of them - their short, chubby little legs lined up on one side and their heads, with the soft spot bludgeoned in, on the other.
That's when she said yes. That's when she came into her office with her basket of hazelnuts and mint neatly on the counter and screamed "yes, Snow, fine, yes!"
He told her of all the things that were expected of victors in the Capitol prostitution ring, and she nodded after each one. Saying 'no' to a client was the same as saying 'no' to Snow. She was supposed to act innocent. She was supposed to be a million things she was not.
She nodded and dressed up in the dress with the too-low neckline and the too-high hemline a week and a half later and tried to smile as her first client ripped the whole getup off of her body, because her sister was alive. She'd made the choice to save the only person she really could.
But that didn't mean she was happy. Johanna Mason was never happy, even if she still had a smidge of family left. Her life was hell. But she was unbroken, no matter how much Snow had tried to break her.