He highlights the damage done to key infrastructure in various districts, and as he speaks, parts of the map light up, showing images of the destruction. A broken dam in 7. – Mockingjay
Sometimes her days are excruciating. Sometimes she has problems simply washing her hands or sits in darkness of her house on end for fear of the electricity's soft, ominous hum, huddling her body of screams when her vision becomes flooded with tides of torture and sparks, or sitting on her porch tying knots in the soft, compliant bark when she remembers the tides swallowed him too.
Flood... tides... swallow... her vocabulary is curiously brimming with water these days.
Brimming...
Part of her keeps reminding herself that she hasn't had the worst of it, that they reserved that for him. But they still made her unnatural.
What is it that Katniss called herself? A fire mutt?
Maybe she is just that, only for different element.
At times, she tries to live a normal life, spends mornings hauling lumber and firewood for her house. Fire, she likes. Fire is safe. It mirrors her temper, her soul. It's the water she fears; water that extinguishes the heat, spreads out like nightmare across her skin, absorbing her, flooding her. And after... the dancing light that curdles her blood.
Sometimes she goes out into the woods and practices throwing axes at trees only to realise that there's no reason to keep it up anymore. She's safe. The Capitol's no more. Snow's no more.
I am no more.
The words surface in her mind: "You're totally safe, Johanna..." The words of the head doctor always make her snort. What did he know about safety, of lack of it? You can't appreciate what you have... until you don't have it.
Like her family.
She remembers how she used to hammer her little sister's braid to the bed post when she didn't want to babysit her. How her older brother used to smack her on the head before he went to the woods every morning and how she always got him in a headlock when he came back in the evening. They, too, were taken away.
And just when she built a surrogate one with the mentors, she was forced into arena to fight them. Killed a few, too. Friendship can only go so far, it seems.
Cecelia had three kids...
She remembers how her brother went out. A tree fell on him, supposedly. There were no witnesses to the accident. What with the vast expanses of forest and not one man in sight? If word weird ever had meaning, this was it.
More followed then. More accidents. Her sister drowning in a river one unfortunate morning. Her father shot by a drunken Peacekeeper. Her mother slitting her wrists...
That one was not an accident but the last line of defence.
Each time she refused to sell herself, more corpses grew ripe for the graveyard. All she loved was soon flushed out.
Then she had only her own life to make a living hell.
Sometimes they took it out on her tributes.
Too many kids from 7 died under her guidance. In a suspicious bout of wildfire or a landslide, sometimes they made their shelters in crevices that came swarming with vipers at night, others made a meal out of innocent looking treeworms that somehow combusted their stomachs later—that was a particularly gruesome year.
They may pretend not to notice, but all mentors bear the scars.
Grove—that was the name of the last girl she mentored. She had gotten six in the training. Only sixteen. Naïve, harmless kid. Not too skilled with an axe. But like others, she was fair game.
Like me.
"You know, Gale, their faces never really go away." she says. "But it's pathetic to admit it, so you just toughen up and brag about invincibility, pretend not to see them when they creep up on you."
"That's what you do."
"And isn't that preferable to snivelling like a little brat?"
She once sniffled that way, during her games—a mask she wore to fool her enemies. But has she ever stopped wearing masks?
Gale just says, "Think she'll ever forgive me?"
She almost growls. They've been over this a hundred times already, and frankly she's tired of digging up ghosts.
"Think you should stop thinking about her. Let her live. She's got little enough reason to already."
"She's got him." A frown comes with the statement and Johanna feels a scowl tugging at her lips.
"And?" she raises an eyebrow. "You're the one who turned tail, moron."
"Yeah, nice of you to remind me,"
She smirks, "That's what I'm here for."
"Is that the only thing you're here for?"
It's a question she's asked herself often. What is she doing here, in District 2, of all places? The answer is hard to admit without embarrassment. Escape would be a sufficient word, she guesses. She couldn't bear 7 with its ghosts and water.
Water.
When she came back to her home district she found it overrun. Flooded. Soil turned into lakes and puddles, trees uprooted—young sequoias and birches and pine. Pine. Her favourite. If she ever had a child, she would've named her Pine. Why her, you ask? Because girls are a lot less trouble to hear her speak it. Ironic, considering all the mess she and Katniss have caused over the last few years.
A broken dam. A dam broke during an attack on 7. She doesn't know how it happened or who did it. The rebels blamed it on Capitol and the Capitol blamed it on rebels and so forth, the same old dance, same dull moves.
The first time she saw it, it felt something of a joke. A sick, twisted joke someone like Snow would play on her and she felt the chill and panicked, cried, and it didn't help that the man was already dead to cause any harm. He sank in a pool of his own poison.
It's funny how water has dominated all aspects of her life lately, from simple bathroom issues to her vocabulary and home. If only the memories would wash away so easily...
"Maybe." she retorts, choosing not to reveal her thoughts. "What's it to you?"
"Just curious," he shrugs, not pushing it.
Maybe that's why she likes his company. Obviously he's not too hard to look at, but it's the fact that he knows to shut up when she needs him to is what makes him that much of a valuable companion. Plus he's about the only person she knows in this damn place. It sure beats being alone.
But she's never alone, not really, and that's what terrifies her the most. If she doesn't seek out people, the ghosts will seek her and those you can't flush out with rude comments.
Today, Gale offered her to teach her to fish. At first she threatened to chop him down to a splinter, then to shove her axe helve so far up his ass he'd be shitting timber for weeks and added that he'll be pissing resin, if he ever suggests anything so idiotic ever again, from the kneejerk she'd deliver to his crotch, just for a good measure. Her big brother would've been so proud. Though some of those she actually heard from Blight.
Then, she thought about what his offer meant.
Water is safe, life-sustaining, it provides food and drink. That's what he wanted to show her and that can only be achieved by having no other choice but to depend on it.
And so she found herself here, strolling the woods high in the hills of District 2, following a brisk mountain torrent upstream with Gale Hawthorne as her guide, searching for a place with current wide and shallow enough for them to start.
They set up camp on a clearing under the open sky. Gale prepares the necessary equipment—the weapons, his game bag... he even sets up a tent—the only one they have, but big enough to hold three,—while she gathers firewood and chestnuts to roast over fire.
There's very little Johanna knows as much about—besides killing—as wood. Her brother may have been a lumberjack, but her father was a carpenter as was her sister—her bother lacked the delicate skill for fashioning wood into anything other than a stump. Though a mere apprentice, Johanna remembers just what lustres she could carve before the Capitol's revenge engulfed and consumed her. The ornate chess set she made for their mother's birthday, for one. The thought of her sister brings out a sparingly familiar sense of longing, of emotional drought left in her absence.
Water... it was water that took her away too.
She re-joins Gale just as he's working away at a thick branch with his knife. He can kill fish with his bow and arrow, but makes a forked spear for her to use. She misses her first catch just barely.
A/N: Second chapter coming up soon.