Despite the confidence displayed in her dreams, Johanna is lost on the real stage, looking down at a great mass of people – as haggard and abused as the ones she so recently left – staring up at her with those eyes that watched her so fervently in a lost dream. They are not all gray, and not all solemn. Lucius was correct. District Twelve is not a place. District Twelve is not even a community, not even a town, not anything. Soot dusts the skies, black chalky residue from the mines nearby, and the pollution is such that the great mass of haze almost makes it impossible to identify the mountains in the distance. Still, much like her own presence, they are there regardless of their ability to be understood. The citizens of Twelve are not hardy, like those in Seven. They're wisps of people, so thin and translucent it is almost as if they could vanish out of existence in the fleeting click of a second.
Johanna quickly arrives at the conclusion that Twelve is not a place, not because it is poor, but because it is dead.
She finds the girl in the last row, skirting on the fringes of the crowd, and Johanna nearly falls to her knees for shock that she is real. She does not look angry. She looks disinterested. Another girl, blonde and much younger, follows in her path, clutching the girl's shirt tail. The girl looks up at her with startling gray eyes, then back down. Her cheeks are sallow, and the bony ridges of her face make for ghastly shadows in the afternoon light. Johanna wonders how long they might survive.
Lucius' words. Everyone starves eventually.
That night, in her dreams, the girl burns.
She is Passopa for a second, tied to the pole in the middle of the commons. But then Septus Bare arrives with matches, and Johanna cannot bring herself to look away.
She awakes to the feeling of Blight's hands on her shoulders, shaking her back to consciousness. He appears panicked with concern, and she can hear him asking if she is alright, that she was screaming, if she is in pain. She throws her arms around his shoulders and tries in her mind to separate the red of Passopa's hair from the red of the flames.
The next morning, she tries and finds she cannot explain to Blight the details of the nightmares; after all, he was the boy in the snow, and this girl was swallowed in fire.
She watches from the train as they leave Twelve - the sunken faces staring as they board, finally dissipating as they slowly edge out of the district. Onto Eleven, says Cornelia. She can vaguely remember reading the words on the cards, but Twelve has been something of a blur. They attempt to coach her for Eleven; apparently, the untimely death of their large tribute – the brute who chased her up the cliff – is still a point of tension, especially since Johanna was the one to kill him. In her defense, he gave her no choice, though she doesn't expect his family to see it so plainly. Blight is very gentle and patient. He coaxes her; Cornelia attempts to encourage. Lucius stares out the window. He almost seems more depressed to be there than she is; briefly, she wonders if anyone waits for him, back in the Capitol. The man with the pink hair and the dog furs.
Cornelia insists on a "girl's night" in the recreation car. Johanna sits with her in silence as some vapid Capitol actress tears apart line after line in a brutally boring remake of some film made during the old regime. Gone with the Wind, Cornelia calls it. She watches the world torn apart by war and cannot help but wonder how a nation could not remember the horrors of the first well enough to avoid the second. Then again, that was hundreds of years ago – and since when has humanity learned its lessons, anyway?
Afterwards, Cornelia chats about boys and growing up in the Nineteenth Section of Sixty-fourth Avenue, the very heart and core of the Capitol. Johanna knows that Cornelia Lolita never had a say in her own social station, but at the same time she cannot quell her feelings of disgust at the frivolous lifestyle which Cornelia leads. She can see her, twelve years old, in her small orange dress and orange hair and orange lipstick, following little Ithaca Maxum home from school, waiting for him to notice her. At the same moment, far away, John Mason is carrying his crippled mother to the mandatory attendances of the Reaping ceremony, and fourteen year old Anne Mason is being recruited to the paper mill to begin a life of chronic pains and aches, a stillborn son, and a sacrificial daughter.
The little orange girl, with her stupid dreams.
The following night, Johanna dreams again of Ariadne, home with the baby. She feeds him from a tiny bottle, sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace. The flames cast jagged shadows on the spiral staircase, like teeth.
Johanna returns from the cold, ax slung over her back, firewood under both arms. Placing the wood down in front of the hearth, she gives Ariadne a chaste kiss and thus begins to feed their little flame until it grows into a warm, humming fire, ablaze with reds and oranges – not like Cornelia Lolita. More like autumn.
She sits beside Ariadne and watches the child slumber. Wisps of colorless blonde hairs are slowly being replaced by strands of red, covering his head in various tones of strawberry blonde. He will look like her, he will look everything like her.
Johanna holds him, eventually, when Ariadne looks to be drifting to sleep in the still silence of the night. He is heaver than she thought, and warm. Although he is Ariadne's son, they do in fact call him Dannel Mason, and he seems to know – his head turns into the softness of her breast and his fists wrap around her fingers, much the same as he does with Ariadne. She watches him, the gentleness in his features, and wonders what he will become. Perhaps he will look as Ariadne, but he will be weened, raised, hardened by Johanna Mason, Johanna Mason the Victor, Johanna Mason the killer who does not regret it. Who does not regret it because it allowed her to hold her son; who does not regret it because it meant that she would live to see the color of his eyes; to be given back to her red goddess, and not thrown to the lions.
Perhaps Asher Mason was born with grace in his heart, but Johanna has a feeling that his nephew will not be so fair. She finds herself ridden with images of a redheaded gladiator, and when he scales the cliff, his fingers do not break.
But Johanna is not one for overextended sympathy. As long as he is strong.
After all, she knew from the start how to manipulate and kill and cull; Why should her son be held to higher moral standards, when they are equally as futile?
If he goes into the arena, if that is his fate, she will tell him. She will tell him to kill anyone he can find. She will tell him to destroy anything in his path. She will tell him to have no mercy. She will tell him to kick them to the ground, boys with swords, as long as they are dying, and to throw brutes from cliffs, and to send little peacekeepers back in pieces for their families to keep.
The Games have taught her what futility is. They have given her the privilege of mercilessness. And they have established, perhaps in her time, but most likely not, that Panem lives in the wild.
They can coax her with cards, but it is meaningless, because in the soot-covered, poverty-stricken detriment that is Twelve, she has recognized in full force that they have created a Johanna Mason that they cannot so easily undo, and all her bits of clay are slowly hardening in that burning flame.
She looks down at him again. So many pieces of herself have been lost, to arrive at what she has found.
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-L