Tall and lanky. Skinny. Stringy blonde hair with split-ends. Brown eyes that remind me of my own.
She has no flipping chance in that arena.
I don't tell her this—at least, not at first. She's already cried so much I'm humiliated for her. And now she's hiccupping to an extent that she isn't able to eat a goddamned thing, her words coming out short and sharp. Nothing like her district partner, who had appeared to me as strong and silent before heading off with the only male victor, Blight, from District Seven to strategize.
He doesn't stand a millionth of a chance, either, this male tribute, but he's more likely to survive a hell of a lot longer than this one.
"What can you do?" is the first thing I ask. She looks too uncoordinated and tall to be able to run, hide or swim well, and too weak to handle any sort of weapon. She's fucked.
The girl takes in three, deep breaths and rubs some tears off her cheeks. I want to feel sympathy for her, I really do, or maybe just a bit of empathy. But I don't. She must realize that she won't survive for long. Not against the Careers this year, not against anyone, for that matter.
"I'm not good at anything," she informs me. I blink. The words seem familiar.
—
"You're strong?" the mentor asks me. I nod, but tell her I'm not good at anything, furiously wiping embarrassing tears from my eyes. I already have a plan in my mind, and so nothing she says is going to sway that; I refuse to tell anyone about it, not even this mentor, as she might go ahead and tell the one that is training my district partner, who will tell him and so on and so forth.
She looks me up and down, unsure of what to do with me. Her name escapes me already, but she must have won the Games a long time ago. She's fucking old. Late forties at the least. So I choose to just stare back at her, trying to show her I have the strength inside of me to win, it just isn't ready for everyone to see it yet.
"We have some work to do," she sighs.
—
"Nothing?" I say to this girl, disbelieving. She could be using my strategy, but that's doubtful. She would have to be a great freaking actress. The tears are more than convincing; they're real, and when she doesn't reply, just stares at her loose threads on her sleeves, I know that this year she won't be the one to prove me wrong. She won't be the one to hop out of her shell and kill barbarically, giving District Seven a victor for the first time in years.
She won't survive.
"You better pick something up fast, honey," I say, "or you're never stepping foot in District Seven again."
This brings on a new stream of tears, and I feel so uncomfortable I consider getting up and walking straight out of this room and taking a nap. But I don't. I just eat my chocolate donut until it's all gone, and I pick up a new one and start eating that while I wait for the chick to settle the hell down. We're still on the freaking train. I can't imagine what she'll be like once the Games actually start.
"Done?" I question, after the sobs have switched back to hiccups. She pushes a strand of hair out of her face and bobs her head up and down. "Good," I mutter, and offer her a chocolate donut. She refuses, but I push the plate back towards her. "You really need to put on some weight right now, and not eating would be a very stupid move on your part."
So she takes the donut, but nibbles cautiously, like she's expecting the thing to explode or something. Whatever. Either way, she's already good as dead. If I were in her position I would make the most of the Capitol—mainly its food because some of it here is quite delicious, compared to the cardboard crap I remember I got served in District Seven, but to each their own and all that baloney.
Once we've figured out her strategy—stay away from the weapons, there really isn't a point with her—and start learning about setting traps, edible plants, et cetera, we meet back up with Blight and the boy tribute for dinner in the dining cabin. Blight gives me a look. Like, This year is going to be shit. I return the look. Like, I know. You don't have to fucking remind me.
—
I go to the training centre at four in the morning so I can throw an axe around without being seen by the other tributes. Unfortunately, the male tribute from One seems to have the same idea, and is chucking a knife into a dummy's heart as I enter. He sees me, smirks as if he knows I'm no threat, and then goes back to the knives. Inside, I give a little bit of a snicker. He'll see. Once we're in that arena, and I chop his head clean off, he'll see.
My plan is ruined because of him though, so I head off to camouflage. The guy shows me a bunch of things within one hour, but it's all fairly confusing and I depart to edible plants, instead. And after only thirty minutes there I have to wonder: do they expect me to memorize all this shit? All I pick up is not to go near three-leaved plants, that's classified as poison oak, and stay away from berries with bright colors; the vivid colors are a warning sign that they're poisonous. The rest goes into one ear and out the other, and the remaining tributes are packing in the training centre now, anyways.
Now I go to knot-tying, half because I want to learn how to tie a good net, but mainly because it's right next to the axe station. I overhear the instructor talking about how to throw an axe, how to hold it, and how to make it go straight through the air or spiral and hit the target, which makes it have a little more effect in the end.
I vaguely listen to the knot instructor saying that to be a good knot-tier, you must have agile fingers, determination, and a passion for the knots, and that's enough for me. I stand up and leave, starved
I eat by myself because allies would be useless. I'm going to kill them in the grand scheme of things, first of all, and second of all they would completely screw my plan over. They'd learn that I have strengths, eventually, and once they did I would have to murder them too. So no allies for me.
—
The tributes I still don't know the names of get back from their first training session, the boy saying who he wants as allies, but the girl saying how she wishes to go into it alone. I'd respect that choice more if possibly she had a secret strategy, but she doesn't. She's the type of person who would tell their mentor about it. And she hasn't told me horse shit yet.
As we all eat dinner that night in silence, besides me and Blight's secret eye-contact conversations that have been going on since I became a mentor, the girl speaks up. "I'm going to die."
"You don't know that, sweetheart," Blight says, shoveling a piece of steak the size of my hand into his mouth, swallowing it in one bite.
I don't say anything. I don't lie to these tributes because I wouldn't want someone lying to me about it. I would rather have the harsher truth spit out to me than a sweet, reassuring lie that'd conclude with my death.
"Yes, I do," she says. And oh my god she's crying again. Blight and the male tribute both look awkward, their forks and knives scraping against the glass plates and chewy steak sliding down their throats. I sigh. Of course I'm the only fucking female tribute. Of course I'm the one that has to deal with this kind of break down.
"Look," I say, and take her plate away from her so her attention is focused on me. "If you're going to die, don't do it like this. All right? Don't cry about it, because, and I'm just going to say it, death for you is inevitable. The way you go about it, however, is your own decision. And don't lose your dignity in the process. Hear me? Don't lose the one thing you have left."
Don't lose the one thing you have left.
—
I run for the Cornucopia because I'm fast and the axe is visibly rightthere, gleaming in the sunlight. Without that axe, I won't survive. Without that axe, I won't stand a hell of a chance against the careers.
I think of my mother, sick at home in bed, while my brother tends to her. My feet move faster, and soon I'm at the Cornucopia, my hands grabbing around the wooden handle of the axe. The other tributes are still racing towards here, so I pull a red backpack around my back and make a break for the woods. I hear the whooshing sound of a knife coming from behind me, and just before it crashes through my skull I deflect it with the blade of the axe. Quickly, I turn around, pick the knife off the ground, and see the District One boy coming at me.
For my mother, I reflect another one of his knives with the blade. For my brother, I swing the axe at his chest with all the power I use to slice down trees back in my district, cutting cleanly right through the boy. When I take a glance around for more pending threats, everyone else is still having it out at the golden Cornucopia, so I gather his assortment of knives into my own backpack and take cover in the woods.
Who's laughing now?
—
For her interview, the girl tells me she wants to portray mystifying. She tells me that my strategy during the Games was a great one, and that she wants them all to think she's doing the same thing. No, it isn't very clever, because it's just going to end up backfiring when she can't prove to them her strength. But it seems to be all she has left, so I say okay and teach her how to come off as mysterious.
While I'm talking, she immediately cuts me off. Rude. "Johanna, do I go to the Cornucopia?"
We discussed this so many effing times I don't know why she keeps bringing it up. Uncertainty, perhaps? I'm her mentor, for god's sake; she should trust what I keep trying to tell her, which is, "No. You go for the Cornucopia, you die instantly. Could be a painful one, too, if the careers feel like putting on a show."
"But what if I made it out of there with a weapon?"
I feel like grabbing her shoulders. Shaking some sense into her. But I don't, because I'm starting to feel sorry for this girl who doesn't stand a chance in the arena, just like all the other years. I stopped learning names two years ago when the boy made it into the final four and died from falling in a lake and drowning in the current. I had grown attached to him. He was good with an axe. An underestimated killer.
Kind of like me.
—
Nobody seems to have seen me kill the District One tribute, because when the pair from Two catch me suspended in a tree, holding my axe in one hand and nibbling on some dried fruit, they laugh. Laugh. The fucking nerve they've got. The girl says, "Hey, Miss, I-Scored-A-Four-In-Training, why don't you come out of that tree and show us what you can do with that axe?"
I did score a four in training. Purposely. Bow and arrow is not my forte, but that's what I showed the Gamemakers, shooting a few dummies in the legs and arms until they dismissed me, looking absolutely unimpressed. Satisfying to me, because this kind of underestimation is exactly what I was hoping for.
"Where's the rest of your group?" I call down before I attack. There's still the two from Four, the guys from Ten and Nine and the girl from One somewhere out there. "Hiding out somewhere?"
I suppose it's because they think I'm no threat with this axe that they actually tell me. "No, we just decided to come hunting for people like you, who think they can hide out from us the whole Games and win," the boy says, grinning up at me, and pointing his bow and arrow through the thick branches.
The branches are too thick, though, and I don't even have to move out of the arrow's way before it gets stuck in one. He swears. "C'mon, you're gonna have to come down eventually! Might as well be now!"
Sighing, I give a sad look out into the distance for the cameras. I wonder if the people of Panem know I'm faking it by now. "You're right," I whimper, and start climbing down the tree.
Once I'm ten feet off the ground with a perfect view of the couple, I throw one of the District One's knives. It doesn't have a fatal hit but it manages to slice right through the boy's bow and arrow, causing him to swear and chuckle at the same time, giving a look that reads this-one-has-spunk to his district partner. While he's distracted I throw the axe, downwards and in a spiral like I picked up from that one training session, so it knocks straight into the girl's head and sticks there. She falls. Her cannon blows. Her district partner screams.
I hop down from the tree as hastily as possible and draw another knife, but he's already got one of his own. Mine is long and wicked and curved, his is longer and more wicked and more curved, but I block his swing, backing up towards the girl. He's angry, I can tell, and he gets a good chunk of skin off my lower leg, and I fall to the ground.
The boy stands above me, raising the sword above his head with an evil, menacing grin plastered on his face. I kick out my legs just in the knick of time, knocking him to the ground beside me, his knife flying from his hand and out of his arm's reach across the forest ground.
And before he can stand up I reach over for the axe, tug it out of the Two's head, and decapitate the boy lying next to me.
—
I've said my final goodbyes to both of the tributes, so has Blight. Now the two of us sit in the control room, staring at the two screens in front of us—one for the girl and one for the boy—waiting for the sixty seconds of agony to end so we can get these Hunger Games on the roll. It's a forest, this year. One that looks eerily similar to the one I killed in.
"They're going to die in minutes," I say to Blight, but I'm really just preparing myself. Each year as our tributes die off, I break down in the bathroom and refuse to come out until the next day when I'm starting to get hungry. Maybe this year, it will be different. Maybe this year I will stand what's about to happen, if I just tell myself it's going to happen.
"Maybe, Johanna," Blight agrees. "But we need to look at the positive side."
I have a faint respect for Blight so I don't scoff as I would if it was anyone else who had said this. Positive side. There's no fucking positive side to the Hunger Games. He knows that. I know that. Everyone but the Capitol and the careers that enter that arena know that. And it's futile to pretend otherwise.
The gong sounds. I can't help but reach over and clamp my hand down on Blight's.
The Games have begun.
—
My list of people who I've killed has gone up to six. Four careers and two of the others. I snuck up to the career camp while they were all asleep, covered the one who was on watch's mouth, and dragged her away deeper into the forest where I killed her off, left for the hovercraft to come, and booked it out of there before the other careers awoke from the cannon blast and realized what happened.
I don't know who or what districts the other two were from, although they were young so I made their deaths quick, but I know the girl I killed was from One, and her death, unfortunately, lasted longer than the other ones'.
Add those six I've taken care of to the people who died in the bloodbath along with just yesterday, and that makes sixteen dead in all. I'm in the final eight. I, Johanna Mason, am in the final eight of the Hunger Games.
Bet that catches the entire nation of Panem off guard, huh?
—
The girl runs to the Cornucopia at the sound of the gong, and I have to wonder. What the hell's she doing? How many times did we discuss how she should not run in that direction, but the opposite? Many, many fucking times. I'm suddenly filled, overflowing, with rage, and I stand up from my chair, yelling at the screen. "TURN AROUND," I scream. "TURN AROUND!"
But she doesn't listen. And, soon enough, the girl from Two has thrown a knife at her, and she drops onto the grass. Two collects the knife and runs off to stab the boy from Nine—who is battling with Twelve for a loaf of bread or something—but I'm still yelling at the screen. "I TOLD YOU. I TOLD YOU NOT TO. Look where it got you." Then I scream out a chorus of cusses, punching the screen and hearing a crack from my knuckles, but I ignore that and look at the TV that follows the boy tribute.
Oh, what is this? A fucking disease? Even the boy's running to the damned Cornucopia. What moronic thoughts are running through his mind right now?
Blight is rubbing his temples and shaking his head. Whether he's frustrated with my actions or the fact the boy is about to die is beyond me, but I'm too angry to even notice the boy from Two kill our male tribute. I just storm off to the washroom, slamming and locking the door behind me, and start to cry.
—
I'm perched in a tree, looking at my final competitors, who are all hunched over around a fire at their campsite. First we have the boy from Four. Tall, tanned, and a sword placed in his belt loop. Then there's the girl from Four. A female version of her district partner, also a sword in her belt loop. The boy from Nine. Stronger and buffer than the other two. Could snap my neck with a twitch of his pinky finger.
"I don't know how she survived for this long with a four in training, and frankly, I couldn't give a smaller shit. But she's going to die by the end of the day," the District Nine boy says. About me, I'm presuming. Who else is there to talk about?
And what happens next is so sudden I barely have time to react. The District Four boy pulls out his sword and slices the Nine straight through the heart. The Nine struggles for a few seconds, but then falls, and the cannon sounds. The girl from Four smiles and turns to give the boy a hug, congratulating her district partner. He returns it, but then swiftly pulls back and slices her through the heart, too. She falls alongside the Nine and her cannon's blast fills the air. The boy from Four doesn't look regretful about this at all, he simply cleans his sword off on the edge of his shirt and sits back down, eating a piece of deer leg.
He must think he has this, I think. He must think he has already won. Just kill off the girl with a four in training and he's back in District Four with one of the houses with the heated floors. What he doesn't know is that I'm in the tree right above him, just waiting for the perfect opportunity to attack.
Which I guess would be now. Let's get this show over with.
So I jump down, not bothering to not make any noise, and his head turns in my direction. Like the Twos did, he also laughs when he sees me holding a weapon such as the axe. "You're going to kill me with that?" I say that that's basically what my plan is, and he laughs some more, standing up with his sword.
"I'll make it fast, just because I want to get home ASA—"
But he's cut off by my axe entering deep into his chest, and he takes a few steps backwards, blood trickling out of the corners of his mouth, before he tumbles down and they announce I've just won the Hunger Games.
—
I watch the rest of those Games in privacy of my own room, staring at the screen as the two, too-happy lovebirds from Twelve are willing to sacrifice themselves with those Nightlock berries so they both can win the Games. Clever, but stupid at the same time. While the girl tribute from Seven's move had just been plain old goddamned stupid.
It isn't easy, training tributes, and then sending them off to their death. And if I get too attached to them, then it just makes everything all the more worse. And although I didn't even know her name I still wish she had at least made it past the bloodbath, or reached the Cornucopia. At least died with the one thing she had left. Her dignity. I'd feel for her family, back in District Seven, but I'd rather be them right now than me. Rahter be anyone else right now rather than me. At least that family has each other. I have Blight. He hardly counts for a shoulder to cry on, when he's always out eating and having spirits with the other mentors.
Finnick, I like Finnick as a friend, and sometimes during the Games I go over to his screen and watch his lasting tributes with him. His tributes always last to the final few, if not win, and he knows how to eradicate all my horrible emotions, sometimes because deep down he feels those emotions as well. But I never told him about Greggory. I've never told him about my mother, or my brother, because I don't think he'd understand too well.
On the day after the Games they ship us home to District Seven and I don't leave my room for another few weeks. I binge on ice cream and pizza. I do whatever I can to get my mind off the Games, off the image of my tribute dying in the hands of the District Two. But I know I'll be out of this depression in a couple more days, I'll go out and meet someone new, only to go away a few months later to train more potential corpses and slip away from that new someone, coming back into depression mode, and then the cycle will start all over.
—
As soon as I get on the hovercraft they break the news to me. My mother died from sickness, and afterwards my brother committed suicide, because she died on his watch. At first I don't believe them. At first I think it's just another horrible, cruel, sick twist they've thrown at me. But then I get home, to an empty house that used to be full of love and compassion for one another, and it hits me. They're gone.
I throw a fit. I knock over the tables and chairs, break the windows with my own hands, and throw random objects across the room. The neighbors come over, apologize for my loss, but I just scream and cry and throw a picture frame at them and they leave. Good. I don't want to see another fucking soul right now.
Then I go to the house they've given me in Victor's Village, with the heated floors and food that makes my mouth water, but none of it means shit anymore. It feels empty without someone else. I feel isolated from the world; alone. I feel so, so tiny in such a humongous house that I can't even consider a home.
The only place I have left to go is my friend Greggory's home, so I go there, and cry into his chest while he holds me to the world. It's scary, because I've never felt so vulnerable before in my entire life, not even when I was in the arena, fighting others to their deaths. And after I go back to my own house that day, I vow to never crash and burn and submit to that emotion, ever again. Vulnerability is a petrifying thing.
And, for about a year, I don't. I'm mildly happy, going over to Greggory's house and helping him cook his dinner, helping him feed his younger sibilings, the lot of them sometimes coming over to my Victor's Village house and making it feel more like a home than ever. These are the only things that really put a smile on my face. For that half a year, I feel too protected to feel afraid, and too happy to think of the Games that are approaching rapidly.
But the Games do come. They have to. They arrive every year, holding two delicate lives in their hands, and then crushing them when the time comes forth. I'm not exactly excited to mentor children to their deaths, the idea is disgusting, appalling, but I know that I have no choice and must go with what the Capitol says or they'll bring certain death to me. Besides, refusing to assist in the murder of the tributes won't help bring the Games down. It will help bring me down.
The girl they choose is a lost hope. Twelve years old and tiny, sobbing with red, puffy eyes. The boy they choose is all too familiar to me, and I find myself in tears when he steps up to the stage and smiles weakly in my direction. Greggory.
Did the Capitol know? They must have. This must be rigged. Those Peacekeepers, they must have seen Greggory come to my house every once and a while, and they ought to have told somebody it would be just a fucking grand idea to stick him in the Games, as the chances of a tribute from District Seven winning two consecutive years in a row is slim to none. And slim is already rotting in the ground.
—
I wake up from another nightmare with a start, seeing Greggory's face on that screen, begging me to send him water or food, begging me. But he had no sponsors. There was no food or water to give. And he died there, because of thirst, because of hunger, because of the Capitol's sadistic mind.
I know I won't get back to sleep so I pace around my vacant house and drink some wine from the fridge. I don't remember how I got a hold of it. It doesn't matter. All that matters is the nightmare, and I'm about to drink it away.
I swig down the entire bottle, and then collapse on my kitchen tiles, in the dark, the moonlight pouring in from the window and illuminating the hollowness of my house. I have no one left to love anymore. I can't think of something that matters in this world.
A/N: So I wanted to write something about Johanna, because she has always interested me as a character, and this sort of came out. A bit on the depressing side, but I did my best with her.
I'm sorry if at points she may seem a bit OOC, or if any details I added about her Games were incorrect.
Hit that review button down there anyways? Tell me if you liked it, or what? Please with an extra cherry on top?
(:
Oh, and sorry about the swearing. Hah. But I found it necessary in… a lot of places, apparently. xD