prologue
When Johanna Mason was fourteen-years-old and big enough to carry a set of tools and a backpack full of provisions, she had every other tough young thing with the skills and the size all took a freight train after school one afternoon and submitted themselves for winter logging employment. Her payment for her first month came in a sealed yellowed envelope at the end of December, and the first thing she did with her own money was to go to the barber and get her hair cut off.
The second thing she did was make her mother cry.
If Johanna had been a boy, this would have never become an issue; but she is also the eldest, and in Seven, there were expectations, especially when it came to one's family. Her father rolls his eyes when he sees the apparent devastation, but he's okay with the development, as far as they are concerned. "It's a phase," he informs his long-suffering wife. "And Snow's balls, woman, we need the added income."
That's all he will hear on the matter, in terms of employment, but unfortuality for Johanna, her list of sins was longer than just her newfound occupation. Her mother sits on her bed that night, desperately clasping her daughter's relucent hand, and begs her to never do anything like that again. She can overlook a lot of things, she says, but for the love of the Capitol, my girl, at least pretend to care about your appearance.
She knows that she did it on purpose. Her hair before had been long, shiny and strong, curly when she did nothing with it but in a charming way that spared her from long hours in front of a mirror. Her mother had long since lamented that it was her daughter's one saving grace. Everything else, apparently, Johanna was lacking in. She wasn't like her neighbours, gentle little things with skinny legs and fresh, pleasant faces. Johanna wasn't friendly, well-mannered, or otherwise engaging; the last time she'd had a little lady over to play with, she'd pushed the girl over into a mud pile, skirts and all. Ever since then, Johanna had been a social disappointment.
And it wasn't just her social skills. If it wasn't her attitude being too brusque then her posture was too arrogant, or her face was too sharp, or her shoulders were too wide; she had the hands of a workman and scowled too much. Her mother had intended for her daughter to live soft, cushy life of a housemate, only then Johanna uttered her first swear word at the age of nineteen months and it was all downhill from there. The fact that she had spawned two boys after only added salt to the wound.
If Johanna wasn't at risk of drawing disappointment from her father, she would demand that her mother give up on her, if she was such a failure. Why bother at all?
Instead, Johanna merely brushed her off, and the next few days consisted mostly of strained silences and pointed looks at home, and at work, occasional jokes and gibes until the foreman tells them to shut it up.
"Short hair, girl or no," Elah says with a snarl. "She still beats your sorry ass on the quotas. So shut your can and get to work."
Adamus, who was smart enough to probably end up in administration when he left school, raised both his eyebrows at her over the rims of his glasses. "I've got some hair product if you'll be needing it." He says, and she bares her teeth at him until he blanches. "No, seriously. It'd bring out your jawline. You'd look killer, Mason."
It's not much, it's barely anything, but she works herself hard afterwards and feels a little less patronized when he slaps her on the back with a Job well done, Mason.
She experiments when she gets back home, with the product. It's for men and the tin is half rusted and it smells like something her father would use as an aftershave, feels like wood glue, but it works. Sweeping the locks away from her forehead and eyes, the sharp lines of her face were even more prominent. As an added bonus, there was no hiding the definition she was gaining in her neck and shoulders.
For the first time in a while, Johanna liked the way she looked.
Come Reaping time, of course, her mother had come up with a solution. It's the only other time aside from their respective birthdays that her mother insists she makes an effort, and the dresses that find her way into her bedroom closet stifling and long, intended to deceive and hide every single thing Johanna had grown to be proud of over the past year, even if her hair is a little too short to make the bows work. She puts up with it because she can't be bothered fighting, even though it makes her blood burn in her veins and scowl even more than usual.
"It's just a phase," her mother repeats the mantra, five, six times that very day, as if saying it will make it true. "You'll see, love. It's just a phase."
.
When Johanna Mason is seventeen-years-old, she is reaped into the 71st Hunger Games, picked out of nearly eight thousand others to be this year's fresh offering. The first thing she does when she gets aboard the tribute train is to spend twenty minutes looking at herself in the mirror, stricken with shock and swimming in a sea of total disbelief.
The second thing she does ― for the second time that day ― is to burst into a fit of tears.
Only this time, they're not the senseless, terrified kind that had slipped free on the long, silent vigil on the train platform. These ones are angry and loud, furious tears that stemmed from sheer, self-absorbed outrage.
Over thousand people between the ages of twelve to eighteen, roughly half of those are female and Johanna, out of all of them, who had only taken tesserae twice in her entire life, was the one to get chosen. She doesn't know the math off the top of her head, but she damn well knew that it was unlikely. What, over four thousand girls and the pre-Reaping dictated roughly that the higher percentage of slips were all those who took it the most? Johanna had sixteen slips in there. Sixteen. It didn't seem fair.
She has to laugh at herself for her naivety. Fair? Of course, none of it was fair. Nothing about anything had ever possessed the decency to be fucking fair.
Instinct has her beating on the long, shiny bathroom mirror that spans one wall. It doesn't smash or crack under her onslaught, which she should have expected all things considered, but it only makes her all the more furious.
She's angry at herself, she knows. Johanna is very much aware that she messed up at the Reaping. All the kids their age knew the basic tenets of survival when it came to the Games. Never look anywhere but forward, never as so much as glance at the person who gets Reaped, and if it's you, so help you, never fight back, never cause a scene and never, ever cry openly.
Johanna sure as Snow failed at the latter two.
She had been too stunned thought the Reaping ceremony to cry, but she ended up doing so when they were left to the vultures on the train platform. Johanna blames her family for that, blames Adamus, who had managed to pry himself away from that insanely overbearing mother of his ― a trait they had shared, and bonded over ― to say his goodbyes. "Get it done with and come home," he had said, bluntly as if it was that easy. "Can't leave me to deal with Elah and Paul alone now, can you?"
Her district partner was a slightly older boy Johanna did not recognise, from another part of Seven. He was tall and well muscled, with an easy grin and an apparent inability to take anything seriously. His name was Linden.
Their escort, Tacitus, the standard breed of Capitolist lunatic who flicked purple glitter everywhere whenever he so much as flinched, was smitten with Linden the second he showed his pleasant, angled face. Johanna, she realises rather quickly, might as well as not exist. Nobody calls for her when she vanishes, or sought to find her out. So she spends the first hour of this death-bound train ride furiously seething in her own company.
She runs both of her hands through her hair and marvels at the way her mother's bows and pins struggle to keep the curls in place. In a fit of renewed anger, she yanks out each individual accessory until her scalp is smarting and the sink is filled with prissy fake-silver pins and white, little bows. Johanna turns on the sink after a moment, wrenching out the filter and watching as they all go tumbling down the drain with a clatter. It is a strange, cleansing sort of feeling. From there, she gathers up water between her cupped palms and throws it over her face, running her wet hands through her short, free hair.
The change is grounding. Like this, free from that stupid silly cardigan thing her mother insists she wears, Johanna can again see the line of her shoulders. Even under this thing, she can feel the way her muscles coil when she shifts. She was always a bulky kid growing up, built like her father as opposed to her thin mother, but three years of work, three years of climbing and delimbing firs, had built her up in the only way hard work can.
Johanna shucks off the dress and throws it into a rejected corner when she returns to the main bedroom. Stood in her underwear, she sifts through the many and varied Capitol clothing left to her disposal and grimaces.
Most of them don't quite fit right, even if they're close, and Johanna wonders how they even do it at all. Do they have a train car devoted to clothes alone? Hundreds of different outfits for each gender and every range and size? There was roughly an hour and a half between when Johanna was reaped and when they set off, so maybe they did it then.
She snorts at all the effort and fishes out some hilarious jumpsuit number that looked like a coat on the top half, belt and everything. That'll do, she decides and Johanna makes a proper effort on her hair with water again (despite the finery, she notes, the bathroom and bedroom are shockingly absent of anything useful in that regard) sweeping the growing-in curls and dark waves away until her face is clear and bare.
Johanna snarls at herself in the mirror, picking out the slight sliver of scar tissue, the dark mark under her jaw left by the shape of Adamus' mouth and the bright, blazing hatred in her eyes.
There. That's much better.