Written for the Caesar's Palace monthly oneshot contest, month of May. The prompt is below.
Johanna-centric fic about her final stay at the Capitol and her old life in District Seven.
Beta-ed by Chasing Silmarils.
"But you can't breathe in if you don't breathe out."
- from "Ghost" by American Authors
When the sparks flew and the wires were wound around her sodden arms, when she screamed that she would never tell any Capitolians about District Thirteen's plans, Johanna thought of District Seven. When she couldn't take the torture and she passed out, mouth open in a scream, water dripping from her hair, she dreamed of her home.
"Daddy!" she cried, holding her arm. "Why am I all red?" Johanna's skin had always been pale, but it had turned an alarming shade of crimson as the hot summer day went on. When she pressed her fingers to her arm a burning sensation came to it, and her face contorted at the pain of this small torment.
Her father bent down next to her. "Didn't I tell you to wear a long-sleeved shirt?" With a furrowed brow and concerned brown eyes, he looked at his daughter's reddened skin.
"But it's so warm out," Johanna protested. It was over ninety degrees - she'd heard her father tell her mother this as he set out for work that morning - which was far too high a temperature to wear such warm clothes.
"That's exactly why you need to wear long sleeves," said her father. "You're sunburnt now. That's what happens when the sun is out, and it burns you and makes your skin red and painful. It can be prevented if you wear clothing that covers a lot of your skin."
Johanna wilted. "But I want to play outside," she said with a slight pout in her voice. She wanted to play in the forest, running along after her father as he cut down the trees that were her refuge. She loved to build miniature houses beside the trees- fairy houses, her father called them teasingly. She liked the name. She could picture fairies flitting among the weeds and fallen leaves, settling in Johanna's myriad of self-constructed dwellings. "Does this mean I can't?"
"If you're under the trees in the shade, you won't get sunburnt. And you won't mind that at all, would you, my little wood elf?" her father said with a warm smile. Johanna smiled too. Her father had given her the nickname when she was very little. He would always tell her she was like a wood elf, with her elfin features and propensity to run around in the forests that surrounded District Seven.
"I won't!" she answered. "Can we stay here, then? I'll be careful to stay under the trees!" She was eager for her clumsy fingers to painstakingly craft more fairy houses.
Her father laughed. "No. We need to get home, so your mother can put something on that sunburn of yours. After that, it's dinner time, and your mother's promised to make pancakes!"
Johanna's spirits lifted. She loved eating breakfast food at dinner. "Let's go home!" she agreed. "I bet I can beat you there, Daddy!"
"Johanna, I'm carrying an ax-" her father started, but his energetic daughter had already raced ahead of him, shouting with glee as she ran through the trees, waving her skinny, sunburnt arms. Laughing, her father ran after her, over the leaf-covered ground to the rolling hills where their home was.
The dream stopped as more volts of electricity were shot through her, undoubtedly to aid her waking. Johanna woke up screaming, all thoughts of fairy houses and her own house driven from her mind. It was all gone now. Her father had been dead for five years. Her house had undoubtedly been destroyed, and all the trees would have burnt by the cruel Capitol. Of course all her fairy houses were gone- they had been destroyed by the years that had passed since that innocent age of believing that their inhabitants were real. At that was left was only electricity, running through Johanna's veins, more potent than the very worst sunburn.
'Hold on, hold on,' Johanna told herself as she squeezed her eyes shut, not willing to watch as the torturers flipped the switch that controlled the electricity. 'Think about District Seven, think about your house, think about when you were younger...' It was all that kept her going, those thoughts.
But they were destroying her. To think of her old life was to make herself sob yet harder when the switch was flipped. Johanna realized what she had lost, and it pained her as much as the electricity running through her body.
She needed to find a new way to manage the torture, to keep herself from screaming aloud the names of all the rebels that were still inside the Capitol, masquerading as Games-loving bastards. All Johanna knew was that she couldn't keep thinking about her childhood. It made her jealous of herself, and it made her sick with missing her home.
But even as the electricity surged and she told herself she simply couldn't keep holding on to her old memories, a memory surfaced in her mind: a pleasant spring day when she was six.
'No!' she told herself, tears in her eyes. She hardly cared that the torturers could see her crying. 'You can't think-'
More electricity rushed through her, more than she had ever felt before, and the thought was ripped from her. She struggled on the table where she laid, her screams renting the humid air. She found her screams coming dangerously close to forming words- the names of District Thirteen's spies in the Capitol. The memory of that long-ago spring day came to her again as she desperately tried to hold on to her will.
Johanna knew she had to forget about all that held her together. She had to force herself to, crying and thrashing on the table. So, accompanied by the strident music of her screams, she felt the memories of the good days leaving her, like old air in her lungs.