So. This is one of the stories I'd already posted before, once here (deleted it), and once in Archive Of Our Own, where I felt it looked much nicer. Anyway. I'm not writing anything at the moment, I'm bored, and I'm looking for inspiration in order to finish this particular story, so I'll be checking its chapters, correcting whatever needs correcting, and posting them here over the next couple of weeks. There's this one chapter, then another four, I think. If by the time I post the last one I haven't yet started writing further, it'll probably mean that I've given up. In the meantime, however, you're free to read the chapters, review if you feel like it, and wait for the next ones to come, if you want. This may not be the most groundbreaking story or anything, but it is, in my own opinion, one of my better-written ones.

Without further ado—

Enjoy!

Chapter I.

Johanna Mason climbed out of the hovercraft feeling as if, indeed, she didn't know where she was at the moment. That was, of course, untrue. She knew perfectly well where she was — District 12. The faded Twelve. Being this the very first time she'd seen it — or, at least, the first time she'd seen anything beyond the now non-existent Justice Building — , she couldn't help but let a certain amount of air filter through her lips as it escaped her in the form of a sigh.

She had suspected something like this would happen to her — the dissociative feeling, that is. She had been told in numerous occasions how green it all was — or had been — around the town that composed Twelve. The fences away north of her and what peeked through the lines of wire and above it were proof enough that all those rumors were true. Thick foliage escalating over gigantic lumps of earth in a natural staircase that only birds were able to fully appreciate. The closest stretch faded down a bend in the distance only to let a few more covered mountains rise into view. Arbitrary melodies built one over the other in a concert of animal voices reached Johanna's ears and threatened to make the already overwhelming feeling grow to uncontrollable extents.

It smelled like Johanna's home. Too many types of trees and herbs came to mind when she inhaled, mixed with a few other unfamiliar scents; all of them hidden slightly under the lingering smell of smoke, coal and fire — and blood, she was unfortunate enough to discover. Blood and dead bodies. That faint smell of putrefaction made her grimace.

The ensemble of stimuli that involved her senses brought a numb sensation to her head. This wasn't just home. The climate, its coldness — fresh air so similar to the one she was fond of, and yet so similar as well to the one she feared, the one that still haunted her sleep more often than not.

She was taken back years into the past: to violent images and painful screams; to the sight of fresh blood flying through the air and down to splatter all over her face, to stain way more than just her body. And she dreadfully remembered what every morning she tried to make herself forget. I'm a victor, she thought. I survived thanks to the deaths of twenty-three others.

That thought, as it happened to her every time it crossed her head, threw Johanna completely off-balance. It was ironic, in a way, that all those that knew her immediately assumed she was immune to the grief attached to the memories every former tribute inevitably acquired while at their Games. However, countless were the nights she spent awake and at the verge of a nervous breakdown provoked by the most recent round of nightmares — as was known to be a standard suffering among the living victors.

'You okay, ma'am?' asked behind her the plain rebel soldier that had accompanied her from District 7.

'I'm fine, yeah,' she answered quickly, rather startled. She appreciated the slight change in uniforms the new regime had introduced to its soldiers, but she couldn't help feeling uneasy whenever one of them approached; most were silent like this one, and that ability added to the dull grey of their clothes that combined so well with the color of the inside of the hovercraft made their unnatural stealth unsettling. At least with the now-extinct Peacekeepers she was always aware of their presence, what with the heavy boots and the white uniforms.

'Know your way 'round?'

'I'll figure it out, thanks.' Johanna blew some air out of her and stepped away from the vehicle to be safe from being swallowed into a turbine.

With a loud whistling the hovercraft took off, turned south and disappeared from view.

Johanna sighed deeply, looking around. She had consulted a few old maps of the place guessing that, if she was planning to be here for a prolonged stay, she might as well have some notion of where things were.

Away to her right was an apparently new wired fence, probably erected to prevent wild creatures from coming into the populated area. A tall pile of rusty metal and splintered pieces of wood rose a few feet into the opposite side, giving off a very ominous air to the atmosphere. The earth beneath Johanna's feet was a dark shade of brown, and it felt soft, muddy, moist from recent raining.

'Hey, kid!' A black-haired, grey-eyed man ran into the clearing where Johanna stood from a nearby makeshift house. 'You can't be here,' he said as he approached. 'You have any idea where you're standing?'

The man had stopped at the edge of the circle of mud where she was, and was wearing the sort of expression Johanna would expect to see in the face of a bossy mother about to scold her children.

Glowering at him, she said, 'On some sort of a sacred puddle, perhaps?'

Surprise ran over his features. 'Well,' he hesitated, moving his eyes up and down Johanna, 'this happens to be the tomb of most of my dead friends, so in a way yes. It is a sacred puddle.'

That explained the smell.

Now Johanna felt embarrassed. Blushing furiously, she stepped quickly toward the nameless man and apologized.

'It's okay,' he said, his eyes now noticing the shortness of her hair. 'You don't seem to be from around here.' Johanna confirmed this by saying she had just been delivered. 'Delivered, huh?' His mouth curved upward in amusement. 'Well, ma'am, next time you could ask whoever "delivered" you to choose more wisely where to put their packages.'

'There's no packages', Johanna answered, beginning to feel annoyed. 'Just me.'

The man frowned as a spark of recognition flashed through his face. 'Hey,' he said, 'I think I know you.'

'Believe me, you don't.' Johanna added, 'I look like a lot of people.' She tried to look away from him when she spoke next, though; she wasn't in any mood for giving out autographs. 'You know how can I get to the Victor's Village?'

The man instructed her, still trying to get a clear glimpse of her complete face. When he was finished Johanna thanked him, apologized again and started walking before he could think of any other questions to make.

As she made her way down the road — or, at least, down what at some point must have been a road — Johanna gazed painfully away from everything she placed her eyes on. Houses without roofs, houses without walls, houses without houses; they lined the path at every side. And amid the chaos there were people crying or trying to move boulders of fallen cement out of their way to free more dead bodies, or simply to have the place they used to call home back to normal. For a second she felt a small smile stretching her features at the sight of a group of seven-or-so year-olds skip around laughing, until she noticed they were skipping around inside a fifteen-feet-wide crater.

It made her feel sad, the amount of destruction that was exposed. The coldness and cruelty with which the Capitol had exterminated a whole District as if it was filled with vermin. Moments like this were the ones that made her feel good about the fact that Snow and all his people had now been killed; but, as always, the feeling also carried its fair amount of regret over the fact that so many other innocents — from both sides — had given their lives to pay for what now was generally assumed as a 'well-deserved peace'.

Johanna thought of Finnick, of Prim, of all the other soldiers she'd known while training at Thirteen and that were no more. She thought of what they did to her at the Capitol — and felt a shudder run through her whole body. Then she remembered, hadn't they done the same to her at Thirteen? What made them any better? Supposedly, the exam had been designed to target her individual weaknesses, but under what circumstances would a street be flooded with water in the Capitol? Johanna still asked herself that whenever she remembered — she could never come up with an answer.

No. This peace wasn't well deserved.

It took her a long time to reach anything she could identify from her analysis of the maps she'd looked up. When she finally did it was simply because the road she'd been following came out to an open space, a perimeter of destroyed buildings all facing the square. The remains of what must have been the biggest building once marked the place where the Justice Building used to stand. The space inside the square had been cleaned, though, and the only thing that was remarkable was a large black circle right at the middle of it — the place where bodies had been burned, Johanna thought, or where the torture devices that surely stood here had been burned, anyway. Back at her own District those things had been left untouched, right at the middle of the square — so that people remembered, they had said. Johanna thought they were just sadistic.

The place was empty. Johanna felt a sort of external sadness, as if the place itself was sad of what had become of it. Opposite to her and across the square she thought she recognized a big oven, probably the place where Peeta used to bake. And inside all the other mutilated structures she identified several different devices or features that told the story of what the locals used to go there to get. There were wooden crates in one place, where they used to stack fruits and vegetables, Johanna was sure, and in other she could see a thick metal door that enclosed what must have been a cold room to preserve meat.

She walked ahead with her eyes firmly set on the ground, determined not to read the story all this destruction was telling her; this account of anonymous murders and indifferent killings. And she was relieved when she started up the narrow path that connected the Victor's Village with the square. It was a quiet, hidden place, discreet enough so that she started feeling the safety that only solitude provided her with. Only then did she realize how anxious she had been since she had climbed down of the hovercraft. No, since before that; long before that. Since she came out of her house, way back in District 7, when she saw the hovercraft appear out of thin air and land outside. Her shoulders had tensed when she went out to greet the silent soldiers that were supposed to guard her from whatever might happen — needlessly, of course. There was no one now who would want to start a war, and if there was, they wouldn't want to kill her; they wouldn't need to step into Seven, when the ones that were worth something lived here, at Twelve.

Johanna let the sensation fill her, feeling warm and happy again. She kept telling herself the reason why she decided to come in the first place was because she craved the company, and because the company she would find here was the one she needed; but in reality what she craved the most was this — the solitude. It made her remember the nice talks with Finnick and the days she spent with her family before they were all killed; the pleasure she got out of training with her axes in her backyard, or of the breeze that would hit her face every other afternoon if she stood in just the right place before the fence that enclosed the Victor's Village at Seven.

She stopped and for a minute considered a particularly green patch of grass a few feet to the side of the path. Seriously resisting the urge to lay down there for the rest of the day, she forced her feet to keep moving.

They were waiting for her.

Her expectations were pretty low. President Paylor had been urging her to make up her mind about where she wanted to live, but had assured her that, wherever she chose to stay, she would be able to live the rest of her life without having to earn a living unless she wanted to.

'You're a war hero,' she had said. 'Without you there wouldn't be peace now. The whole world owes you, Johanna.'

Johanna realized at some point that with the war now over no one really knew what to do with the surviving victors. They weren't supposed to be important anymore, because they were the legacy of what the past regime forced its population to do; they were the living proof that the Capitol held such power over the people that it could make a bunch of teenagers become murderers and then be awarded for it. In a way they were now seen as a shameful reminder of the past.

Johanna thought all that was pretty hypocritical. Maybe she had killed people in order to survive, but she didn't remember any of those who now accused her of yielding to the will of a sadistic government jumping out of line to defend her. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons why she had decided to come to Twelve instead of staying at Seven was because she remembered how they all celebrated and watched attentively every year to see what happened at the Games. Now, though, they remembered all those years with shame, regret and indignation, stating every few weeks through the media and broadcasting it live all over the country how cruel and ruthless Snow had been and how he had corrupted and brainwashed a whole number of generations by forcing them to watch the now disgusting Games.

She didn't lie to herself. She wasn't like everybody else. She remembered how there were at least three Games which she actually enjoyed. Right after she turned thirteen and had mostly resigned herself to the fact that this was the world she lived in, it was as if what she was watching wasn't real people; as if what was on the screen was a number of people reenacting the sort of romantic stories her mother used to tell her at night of the war heroes and whatnot. They were just actors. And thinking like that she felt, by the time she was fifteen, that maybe at some point she would be able to watch it without feeling disgusted of being human.

Then came her Games, and all that she was, all that she wanted and all that she had achieved in her mental and personal landscape that could be considered an achievement crumbled to the ground. They tore her apart. They made her do things she didn't believe herself capable of doing. But then again, she wanted to survive. The moment she climbed into the train after she was reaped she had promised herself she would do all she could to go back to her family.

It broke her. The Games broke her. With her escort and stylist Johanna had schemed one of the best strategies in the history of the Games — to be weak and pathetic so that the other tributes would ignore her until the very last minute. No one knew she had an amazing ability with the axe — in all its varieties — due to her father; the man was obsessed with not losing a child to the cruelty of the Capitol and had instructed his sons and daughter on how to use it. As soon as one fell in her hands her cover was blown off, along with most of who she was. The last five or so tributes died at the mercy of her axe.

Johanna still visualized some nights the hovercraft that appeared right after she was announced victor. Both the hovercraft and the sky had looked red through the layer of blood that partially covered her eyes. And though she had come back to her happy family it was never the same. They weren't the same and neither was she. Nothing felt the same anymore.

The only thing she couldn't bring herself to appreciate of her solitude was how much it put her to think. Six years had now passed since she won her Games; and if she thought things had changed after she had returned to her house, she only needed looking at where she was now to comprehend that that change had been nothing compared to what the last year had brought.

In the distance she saw how the tall houses came into sight from behind a hill as she walked. They were untouched; they hadn't even heard the bombs that had fallen not a mile away. The dull color of everything around here reflected the mood of all the inhabitants of the Village. The grass of the gardens was covered in ash, as were the roofs and walls of all twelve houses; the flowers were dead, and it seemed like this was the only place around the whole district that was contoured by fence and forest but to which no birdcall or animal grunt came in.

The only color that stood out under the sun was the bright yellow of a large bush located at the side of a house to her right. Johanna approached it curiously. The bush looked scragglier the closer she got until finally she was looking down at the sad picture of faded flowers about to die. Several bent buds had picked a rather brown and sick taint, and the few ones that were about to bloom were facing slightly downwards, their thin stems painfully folded under the weight they had to support.

The whole impression Johanna got of such sight was one of utter depression.

A particularly nasty brown bud rose above all others right at the middle of the bush, as if showing off the fact that the ugliness of what could be beautiful was started at its very own root; it was bent also, up there where it stood, in such an angle that it almost appeared to be pointing at Johanna.

That evil bud disgusted her. It made her think of all that was good in the world and that was obscured always by the bad stuff.

'Up here where I am,' she imagined it was saying, 'I'm able to prevent all the potential of this world to be reached.'

She felt like gagging, and she probably did once or twice as she turned away, her mind once more flooded with the unholy images that were her past. She retraced her steps and stood in the middle of the green to which all the houses faced. Bending over, she placed her hands on her knees as she had done a while ago and tried to regain her breath.

Her eyes closed. She tried to imagine what the world would be if people weren't evil, if Snow hadn't turned them all into sadistic, hypocritical perverts; if the brown bud on top of that bush wasn't there. The yellow would bloom powerfully, she was sure. Neighbors would take care of each other's gardens and compliment whoever went by in front of their houses. They wouldn't be picking up the pieces of their beloved from what remains of the place where they grew up, they would be talking excitedly about where to spend their next summer, about what to eat tomorrow morning. Teenagers would be speaking in hushed voices to the ones they loved, planning together what would become of the family they both cherished. Husbands and wives would be trying to decide what to name their children.

The heels of her hands dug the tears out of her eyes. She inhaled heavily for a few minutes, repeating mentally the lines she had been advised by her head doctor to repeat whenever she felt like this. My name is Johanna Mason. My home is District 7 — 12, District 12, she stopped herself.

'Johanna Mason. District Twelve,' she muttered slowly. Her mouth kept moving, voicing the words as her chest relaxed in response to her efforts to slow down its movement. 'District Twelve,' she finished.

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