Author's Note: I've done all AU so this is more of a canon story, except obviously it will be Joniss and I've altered Peeta and Johanna's Capitol torture a bit. So it's slightly AU but the characters are essentially the same. Read and review! Thanks!

Power.

In sessions with her head doctor, Johanna was asked how she coped while she was being tortured. She explained, impatiently, that the shocks is not what almost broke her. It was the waiting in between the shocks. The times when she was laid up in her cell, listening to Peeta's screams and trying to get her body to stop shaking. The indeterminable lengths of time that she was certain they varied on purpose. Sometimes they'd only wait a few hours before strapping her down again. Sometimes it would be days. But always there was the constant stream of water and the constant stream of Peeta's screams.

How, he would ask. How did you cope?

Power.

She daydreamed. The one place that was safe from President Snow was deep within the recesses of her memory. She allowed her mind to traverse the forest of her memories, climbing trees of thought and reliving the moments that meant something to her. Her mind scaled the trees of Seven as a child, her mind learned guitar at her uncle's feet, her mind remembered her first kiss, stolen on the playground by a boy whose name she couldn't remember, whom she had laid out flat with a punch to the jaw. She focused on the flickering flames of the village bonfires, how they'd dance with oranges and reds kissing the sweet pine air.

Johanna tried not to dwell on the moments that destroyed her, like the times she allowed herself to be whored out by the Capitol or the dying eyes of the tributes she had killed. Those memories were the real gift from the Capitol. Her doctor had her examine those memories, too. Neutralizing your anger, he had called it. Digging out the reasons why she was so angry and robbing the power from them. Render those memories impotent and they can't hurt you.

Powerless.

War and sex is all the same and those were Johanna's talents. Even before the Reaping that changed her life, it was always war and sex. Fighting in the schoolyard and fucking in the forest. Had she any friends to be interviewed when she was in the arena, they would have exposed her "helpless" charade in a moment. Her reputation as a spitfire was as blatantly obvious as her black hair.

War is about conquering others for your gain. Sex is too. Sure, it can be an intimate give-and-take of emotion or whatever else kind of fairy tale imagery you want to conjure up, but at the end of the day it all comes down to one thing: Who's on top?

Johanna was. Always.

The first time in the Capitol was not so bad. It was just sex, a service like any other. No emotion, no feeling, no real purpose other than getting off. The man came and went without so much as a word to her. He was probably more nervous than she was. It was the first time she realized the power within her body. The power of her body. Her nakedness was not lack of armor. It was the armor. People, especially people in the Capitol, hid behind their outfits and wigs and accessories. Johanna didn't hide. The Capitol had made her District-scarred skin beautiful, the Games had made her body fit and athletic and her prostitution had made her shameless.

Other "clients" had special requests like forcing Johanna to wear certain outfits or having her abuse them. After showing herself to be a ruthless killer, people seemed to want to act out a fantasy of being at her whim. They wanted to be degraded and abused and Johanna was more than willing to oblige. She hated them almost more than they hated themselves.

A small part of her enjoyed it. She hated that part of herself.

All things considered, it wasn't exactly the worst experience ever. It was far from enjoyable but less dangerous and physically debilitating as the other jobs in her district. Lumberjacks, carpenters, log pullers, all losing limbs and fingers and hope. With sex she only lost time. And a little, tiny bit of who she had been before the 71st Hunger Games.

She, like Finnick, amassed an arsenal of secrets. The money was fine, yes, and the jewelry and clothes were wonderful. But the secrets? They were what kept Johanna going on the exhausting nights. They were what kept her from going insane when she was allowed home for short periods of time and trying to maintain a normal facade for her parents and sister. The secrets were what helped nurse the lonely nights on the train back home after watching two of her tributes get murdered. She and Blight drinking themselves into a stupor until they were back in the safety of their respective homes in the Victor's Village.

It was these secrets that kept her a prisoner after the Quell but they kept her alive. The things she knew about prominent Capitol citizens (possibly defectors) and the Rebels were what Snow wanted from her. That, of course, and her pride. But he'd never get either.

The incidents in the Capitol she detested most took place in a room much like the fetish bedrooms they were usually in. The wall opposite the bed was cut out to fit a large mirror. Again, not strange; for whatever reason people liked to watch themselves have sex. Other walls would have an arsenal of sex toys Johanna couldn't even identify a purpose for. It was when someone else Johanna recognized entered the room, she realized what was happening. Two victors and someone paying to watch them beyond the mirror. Maybe several people, Johanna never knew.

That's how she got to know the others. Cashmere, Enobaria, Finnick. One of whom she would end up killing. One of whom she hated. And one of whom who became her best friend. Her only friend. There were others but those three seemed to be the most popular.

It wasn't the forced sex with friends or strangers that turned Johanna from this prostitution. It was the person who would become final client to request her services. A deceptively beautiful woman who at first glance, Johanna wouldn't have turned down even if she wasn't being coerced. Long, auburn hair. Penetrating blue eyes, clear like the waters in Four. Flawless skin that despite her age - Johanna figured maybe forty or so - was tight and smooth. She didn't speak in an affected tone or wear garish make-up or costumes. She seemed perfectly normal, if not peculiarly attractive. If she hadn't reeked of money and privilege Johanna would have guessed she was from Four or another fair-skinned district.

The only rule in Snow's business of pleasure was that you weren't allowed to hurt the victors. They could hurt you, only if you asked. The woman ordered her to strip, so she did. She ordered her to lay on the bed, so she did. She ordered her to not make a sound, so she didn't. She explained calmly, as Johanna lay naked on the white sheets in silence, that she was a special friend of President Snow. A member of an elite, exclusive organization of people that helped keep him in power. He owed her favors.

She was calling in one of them.

It hurt. All of it hurt. The woman didn't really want sex. She wanted power. War and sex are one in the same and this woman wanted war, but she didn't want Johanna to fight back. If Johanna struggled, the woman hurt her more. Physically, sexually, verbally. Johanna withstood the abuse for hours until the woman finally fell asleep out of pure exhaustion.

Johanna couldn't count how many scars she had on her body. Gashes, burns, bruises. Mentally, she fared no better. The woman had somehow found out things about her family, about her life and whispered threats and degradations in her ear. Worthless whore, wouldn't your daddy love to see his little girl like this? His special little Jo. Johanna had begged her to stop. It was the last time she ever begged in her life.

The white sheets were tie-dyed red by the time Johanna had regained enough strength to leave the room.

When she confronted Snow, he dismissed her. She owed the Capitol now. Her family lived in a spacious home, free from worry and strife. Her life was one whirlwind of special occasions and banquets. She'd never starve like the miners in Twelve, or get killed for insolence like the farmers in Eleven. She'd never go through the punishing physical endurance trials of the kids in One and Two. She'd never drown in a freak maelstrom like the sailors in Four. She was lucky. Johanna supposed perhaps she was lucky, but that night never left her. Even after asking Finnick and the others, who all confirmed a visit from the same woman, she couldn't shake how worthless she felt. How used.

Powerless.

The next time she was called to the Capitol, she marched right into Snow's antiseptic office and denied her services. He issued her a warning but she was a cyclone of venom, hatred and anger. She was immune to his threats, his cajoling and stormed out of her meeting with Snow feeling vindicated. She would no longer be the Capitol's whore. Head held high she embarked on the train back to Seven.

Upon her return, her family was nothing but a pile of ashes in a razed backyard.

An accident was the official verdict, but no accident ever looked so contained. It had the practiced, perfect execution she knew only Snow and his people were capable of. Only her backyard was on fire, her trees burned to the ground, her family nothing but bits of ash huddled around the graveyard of a bonfire. The only people in the world she loved were were dust. They were smoke and ashes and nothing. There was nothing to bury, nothing to show for their lives. All her pictures, all their belongings had vanished in the short trip from the Capitol to Seven. Johanna had nothing.

Nothing but her own anger and her power.

So how did she "cope" in the Capitol? She thought of why she was there: The Mockingjay. It only took around five minutes for her to be convinced into joining the rebellion. She had seen pockets of rebels form in Seven, meeting in cabins deep in the woods beyond the electric fences. A lot of people in Seven were still loyal to the Capitol and for many reasons. Seven didn't suffer like some of the others did. They were middle class and not starving, and they bordered One so they often got some of the fruits of the luxury district. People felt fortunate to be born into one of the most stable districts.

Everyone else saw the farce. You are only as safe as you are compliant. Johanna didn't live her life that way. Certainly not anymore.

Seeing the star-crossed lovers of District Twelve win their Games together sent conflicting emotions through Johanna. Jealousy and hope. Jealousy because she was no longer the most talked about Tribute any longer. Her fame dwindled as Katniss Everdeen's story ran aflame across Panem and her sister, Primrose, became the country's darling. Whereas her sister had become fertilizer for the fir trees in her backyard.

But of course, hope. Hope that this girl, with her braid and her arrows, could spark a true revolution in the fucked up country they called home.

When she did, Johanna swore to protect her. Haymitch said bring her Nuts and Volts and she did. He said cut out her tracker if they got caught. She did.

Protect Katniss. That is what consumed her thoughts when she was waiting for the next round of electric shocks. Was that job finished now? Was Katniss dead? If not, then Johanna still had a job to do. She had to protect her until this was over.

In her sessions with her doctor he tried to convince her it wasn't necessary anymore. Katniss was safe in Thirteen, being watched around the clock. But Johanna was not fooled. There was still an enemy in their midst and no one knew it but her.

The first time she saw Katniss Everdeen was not in the elevator at the Training Center. It wasn't even when Katniss volunteered for her sister at the 74th Hunger Games. It was when Katniss was eleven and Johanna was fifteen, and the country watched as she and a few other depressed looking kids received medals of honor when their fathers exploded in one of the mines.

The ceremony was required viewing for everyone in the country, and Johanna had been sitting in the black market bar in Seven with a whiskey to her lips watching them. She saw the girl who would later catch fire, but then she was just a lost little girl with the same braid down her back. Her wrinkled black dress not covering scabby knees and thin calves. However there was something living deep within the murky gray eyes that seemed to be copied and pasted on the other people of the district. There was a fire. A fire that wasn't quelled by the soft words of the mayor promising money and hope for the families of tragedy.

Johanna had a special eye for fire, being born of it in District Seven.

She couldn't forget that day not only because it was the first time she saw the girl who would change her life, but also because it was the same day she had her first real kiss. Not the boy on the playground, but the woman in the white suit. Nova, the nineteen-year-old Peacekeeper who somehow managed to keep Johanna out of trouble before she was reaped. She was from Two with long blonde hair and caramel colored eyes, a round chin and a nose that was crooked from a playground brawl gone awry in her youth.

Her first kiss tasted like beef stew and whiskey and smelled of balsam and lavender. Nova's lips were gentle and insistent, practiced in kissing but urgent in their need. Her back was pressed against the curved log exterior of her neighbor's house, her hips pulled against the slick white material of Nova's Peacekeeper's uniform. Soft fingers were in her unruly black hair, tangling her messy locks as her lips pressed for more.

The air was bitterly cold against Johanna's plaid shirt, the sleeves rolled up just to her elbows. She hated wearing jackets because it was a hinderance in her grabbing her axe but the February cold didn't bother her. There was enough heat between them to burn the house they were against down to the ground. Nova pulled away from her, all swollen lips and apologies. She had overstepped her boundaries.

No, Johanna had insisted. She had been a willing participant. And she'd be a willing participant again if Nova wanted to meet her beyond the electric fence. Johanna never forgot the wide smile that seemed to appear magically on Nova's face when she had said that. Nobody had ever smiled at her that way before, with such affection.

She was young. She was in love. She was stupid.

They did meet beyond the fence a week later and spent a night in an abandoned cabin beside a fire. Johanna learned how her body worked and just how much she enjoyed the soft feel of another woman. There was something inexplicably thrilling about the soft, non-threatening skin of a woman and the high gasps they made. She especially enjoyed Nova's.

That was the first and last time they'd ever share a moment like that. Only a few short weeks later Nova had been shipped back to Two to help guard The Nut and Johanna was left heartbroken. There was no soft skin to feel anymore, no hot breath to feel against her cheek. Most upsetting of all, no one to look after her. Nova had kept the other Peacekeepers away from the troublesome teen, but now there was no barrier. It was she against the world.

But they had the power. Johanna had nothing but a bad attitude and a way with an axe. Not much she could do against a Peacekeeper with a whip and a gun. Not until she won her Games. Then she strolled through the streets of Seven with an axe tucked into her belt; carrying a weapon was against the law in Seven but the law didn't apply to Victors.

She didn't think of the poor, starving girl with the braid again until she saw her emerge from the crowd of denim-clad kids in Twelve and volunteer herself into the Games.

Johanna saw the flames inside her again. She was rooting for the girl on fire.

Johanna had faced certain death five times in her life:

1. When she almost got herself sawn in half when she was a toddler and got too comfortable around her father's buzz-saw.

2. When she nearly got swiped by a spear during the 71st Hunger Games at seventeen and it instead lodged in the tree next to her.

3. When the blood rain poured into her mouth and eyes during the Quarter Quell at twenty-one and nearly both drowned and blinded her.

4. When she cut out Katniss's tracker and was nearly torn apart by Enobaria after lodging an axe into Brutus's chest.

5. When she had mouthed off to the guard administering her shocks during her Capitol torture and he nearly killed her with the last round.

Her body writhed on the cold tile floor of her cell, forever damp from the water that never seemed to fully drain from the floor and the constant dripping above her head. By her estimation she had been inside the Capitol for three weeks. Three fucking weeks. She didn't see much of the Capitol's main building outside of her white-on-white cell. Everything was so painfully white and sterile, just as Snow wanted it. At night her mind would wander to colorful things - the bursting colors of fall back in Seven, the searing blue of the summer sky, the chestnut brown of Katniss's braid, the crimson red of her blood down her arm as she stared disorientedly up into Johanna's eyes at the end of the Games.

Between Peeta's screams for Katniss and her own consuming thoughts, the Mockingjay was always present. Johanna had mangled dreams of Katniss getting scooped up by the Capitol. Burned alive. A fitting end for the "girl on fire" Snow would mock as Katniss silently went up in flames. She'd wake up in a sweat, but the sweat would just be the same moisture she'd carry with her all the time now. She missed being dry. When she wasn't plagued with nightmares about seeing Katniss burned alive like her family had been, she dreamt of the dry warmth of a fire. The crackling of wood and the sulfury smell of pine as it was incinerated. The dryness of dead leaves. The dryness of a warm towel. Dry. Warm. Things she could barely remember, what with all her senses being soaked.

Her cell was almost like a giant bathroom. White tiles ran from the drain in the center of the room to the jets of water on top. There was no bed. There was no chair. There were only two large metal chains that hung from either wall. The Peacekeepers would come in, chain her wrists to the walls and position her over the drain. She wore a skintight white jumpsuit that cut just below her knee, not unlike the black one they gave for training before the Quell.

Except this one was only a formality. It provided no protection, served no purpose other than to cover her nakedness. Often at night she'd take it off, if she possessed the strength, just to be a thorn in the morning and force one of them to dress her.

They would drench her in water, soaking her freshly shaven head. It was a brand new sensation, that first time. She had always possessed a pile of black, messy hair that protected her scalp. But now she was nearly bald, only a thin later of hair stubbornly clinging to her head. The water would bounce off her scalp, much colder than it felt when it hit the rest of her.

They'd ask questions. She'd spit sass. They'd shock her. She'd curse at them. They'd shock her. It was this routine that made Johanna think that maybe there wasn't still a rebellion. She knew nothing of the country outside of her cell, so who knows? Maybe Katniss was killed in the Quell. Maybe Snow had put down the rebels, flattening the Districts that caused problems. She didn't even know what she was fighting for.

But she was Johanna Mason. Fighter. Victor. Victim. From the ashes of her family she had vowed never to stop fighting Snow. In small or large ways, he would pay for what he did. This was her rebellion, even if it was just a small one. She'd fight it until she had no more breath in her lungs.

The pain of the shocks was excruciating. Unlike any other pain she had ever felt. It crept up her nerves and set her skin on fire. It left (almost ironically) tree-like scars up and down her skin. Bright red and pink welts that spread out like roots across her body. There were no mirrors, hell there weren't even any windows. There was just whiteness, water, and the screams of the baker next door. But she was sure she looked like absolute hell.

When she finally saw Peeta he looked deceptively healthy. The room was all white, Snow in the center on top of a white throne. Her reaction to seeing him was one even she was not prepared for. She lunged for his throat like an unrestrained cougar, only to be knocked down by a nearby Peacekeeper after taking down two of them without a weapon to her name. When she came to, her bruise from his hit was gone, and there were suddenly twenty Peacekeepers in the room. Peeta looked robust, shining. She imagined she looked similarly healthy, in spite of the wealth of bruises and scars all across her skin. The itchy blonde wig they procured for her hiding her near baldness.

It was a propo. She was instructed to stand still. She was forbidden to speak to Peeta. She was handcuffed behind her back until just before filming, when the handcuffs disappeared but the white bracelet on her left wrist remained. She could feel the familiar buzzing from the cuff. It was electrified. She didn't know who was controlling it but it was no matter. If she so much as looked at Snow wrong, she knew the consequences. What would it serve her to kill Snow anyway? The Mockingjay was probably dead.

...But she wasn't. The television monitor showing them their own broadcast cut and she saw his face. Beetee. District 13. The Mockingjay lives.

Peeta and Johanna finally exchanged a look. Relief. Katniss was alive. The rebellion was still happening. Johanna did nothing to stop the high, long laugh that bubbled from inside her chest and expelled out of her mouth. She could see Peeta's warning look but she ignored him. How good it felt to laugh! She hadn't laughed, even a little, since agreeing to split the loaves of bread during the Quell. She laughed to know that Snow was losing. Katniss was alive. Armed with that knowledge Johanna went down like a bag of bricks as the cuff on her wrist shocked her. She paid the pain no mind and continue to laugh.

The next propo was not the same. Peeta looked worn down, beaten. Johanna figured she probably looked tired, too. But neither of them looked as awful as Annie Cresta. Her normally lush red hair was flat against her head, pin straight as it fell down over her shoulders. Bright green eyes were dull. Her thin lips quivering in fear as she stood next to Johanna, unable to speak.

Enobaria was there, too but she looked fine. It took all of Johanna's willpower not to strangle that dumb bitch where she stood. At the very least, she and Peeta were slightly to blame for the rebellion. He was one half of the star-crossed lovers that had been part of the igniting, and she had willingly talked disparagingly about the Capitol, and saved the lives of Wiress (for a time) and Beetee so they could survive and help in District 13. Most damaging of all, she protected Katniss.

But Annie Cresta was innocent. And yet here she was, looking deprived and out of her mind, while Enobaria stood looking strong.

Fuck the Capitol.

The night before the rebels stormed the Capitol, Johanna's torture was particularly harsh. They seemed more desperate this time. They called her names, told her all the terrible things they were going to do to Finnick, to Annie, to Katniss, once the rebellion was put down. When they were finished she could barely keep her eyes open. She must have looked asleep or dead, because they stood in her doorway and had a chat instead of leaving and slamming the door, as they usually did.

"He's afraid they'll come for the boy. Put a trigger word in him."

"Trigger word?"

"Yeah. If they come in here and take him, they bring him back to the girl. Everything's fine until -" The man snapped his fingers. "Boom. Killer. He'll tear her throat out and they'll never see it coming."

"What about the hijacking? Won't they know?"

"Nah, it's locked in there. But just one word - a word they'll definitely say around him - and he'll snap her pretty neck."

"What word?"

Johanna passed out.