AN: I started this back in 2014 and it's evolved quite a ways since. Anyway, I own nothing. Hope you enjoy!
stronger than her story (once she's lost the plot)
The doctor gives her a too-perfect grin and holds up the mirror. He tells her to smile.
Still groggy from the anesthesia, Enobaria bares her teeth instead - and they are shiny, sharp.
"We had them whitened, filed, and embedded with diamonds," the doctor explains while she gapes at her new mouth in the reflection, "in honor of your show-stopping performance."
The sensation of tearing through flesh and sinew - the wet crunch of it - ghosts through her mouth like tasting a lemon rind. She flexes her jaw.
She's about to ask when she consented to this operation but cuts herself on her own teeth. Her tongue had roamed over them in curiosity. She presses it to the roof of her mouth and tastes iron.
Blood wells up along her bottom lip. As she looks past the mirror to the doctor, it spills over and carves her chin and neck in half with a scarlet line.
The doctor stares, transfixed, before he offers her a tissue.
There's a cut on Johanna's inner thigh that stings when she moves, and she remembers thinking it was a great idea - the only idea - to return the slash but higher, to the naked man's neck.
Johanna Mason never misses, never shows mercy, the commentators said last year. Somehow they thought she could leave that trait behind in the arena with her matted tresses of hair - as if it wasn't what made them want her so badly as... that.
She presses the button for the ground floor and waits with steadying breath.
At least she's no longer shivering and topless in front of a stranger after he made her uncross her arms. Her body is as still as it was when that boy's head rolled across the dirt and she'd locked eyes with his ally, who wasn't taunting her anymore.
She unmasked herself as something wicked, then, and they took it as a challenge.
Her stomach jumps as the elevator descends.
Maybe she was meant to find another mask for this part of the show.
It doesn't matter anymore, really; there is a very rich man bleeding out on the eighth floor, and her family is going to die.
Her tears are real this time.
Enobaria arches her back like the older couple wants her to. They are tycoons in the masonry industry. Her entire village's income could be traced back to them.
Her tribute died two hours ago, and she's still swallowing the hard-lumped failure of that as the finale plays out across from the expansive, plush bed.
Through the mirror on the headboard, she can see him behind her with a red, oblong mark on his neck. His wife boasts several more at her breasts, her hips, her inner thighs. Now she's splayed out and entrusting Enobaria not to break skin.
They both moan when she does - just to kill the guttural silence. She's quiet otherwise. Because no matter how hard she practices, she still speaks with a slight lisp. It's painfully risky to enunciate. More often than not, her tongue rests in the gingival shelf behind her chin. Anything else risks becoming an Avox.
She does but doesn't feel like a victor. In Two, victors are held up as stoic pillars of duty and honor. She understands duty and honor to be heavy things but she won't call them burdens. In the same way the slabs of mountain cut from the quarries aren't burdens.
She just didn't expect to be rendered as silent.
She comes home to find them swinging under the trees that line her government-issued property.
She shivers and sways with them until she falls to her knees, her forearms. Stray pine needles bite into her skin as she rocks herself back and forth.
There are silky, yellow petals of a flower not native to this region scattered among them… beneath them.
Johanna keeps her grief cold with saltwater and sawdust, weeping as she builds their pyres alone.
The bloodbath is over, and now they're all out for blood and money and blood money.
Johanna glares through the crowd of sponsors at her.
The black lanyard says lapdog. The teeth say fanatic. The glinting dark eyes that angle up at an equally coy sponsor say leverage.
Johanna sips rye whiskey and smirks in a brittle way that says none of the above.
But both of their tributes are still in, and Enobaria can choke on her tongue for all Johanna cares.
Enobaria tracks her in her periphery and sees her pull the green lanyard up from her neck, dangle her head with a bored look, then break into a grin - her teeth unabashedly normal, dull and grey with a front gap - at Finnick and the event bartender.
Johanna gets to retreat behind the elevator doors at the end of the night and order room service for one.
She doesn't have to hold her tongue, either. She could certainly stand to, sullying her victory and all the responsibility it entails - the good, the bad, the rich and ugly - as she does every year.
Enobaria grinds the ice from her drink, and her teeth slip and skip over each other and ache in that resonant, neural way.
If I had a mouth like that, she thinks, I'd rip out Snow's carotids. I'd eat his heart.
If I had a mouth like that, she thinks - and that's as far as her mind goes.
Days before the Third Quarter Quell, Johanna oils her body for wrestling and shouts jokes across the table at lunch.
Her lips carefully closed, Enobaria smiles at the newest victors who won at her district's expense - only because Brutus got it in his head that they could have an ally in Katniss. Their eyes flicker downward in morbid awe when she tells them hello, and she closes her mouth again.
The night before they all vie for the crown again, Johanna joins in the smattering of dissent. She calls on the Capitol to cancel the Quell.
Enobaria rolls her eyes and swallows her tongue back but she holds onto Gloss and Brutus with the rest of them.
Enobaria cuts the golden wire, and Johanna sees the plan fall with it.
Johanna goes against instinct and flees in the opposite direction.
She wants to get to the tree.
But she needs the Mockingjay to get to the tree.
With Brutus dead, Enobaria is the only one left who doesn't seem to have a death wish. A few more cannons, and she'll be hailed as the victor of victors.
But then the arena explodes.
The interrogators act surprised that Johanna is able to keep her mouth shut so well.
She's as loud as always when they work on her but she's not screaming out secrets. She bites down hard on her tongue whenever she's tempted, knowing it won't change her fate but it might change everything else.
They shove a mouth-guard through her lips and prepare the hose and wires.
Enobaria hears what must be the only entrance - the only exit - groan open and shut to her left, and incoherent screaming to her right.
From studying their films, she's fairly certain who is who. Johanna and Peeta must be the biggest conspirators.
Her mouth-guard has been misplaced. She has to pack her mouth with strips of her issued blanket before she lies down to sleep.
It's the least of her worries, what with the districts in rebellion and her loyalty in question - and the sounds to her right. But she's not given much else to do except pace and sleep; her cell is bypassed more often than not. She's answered their questions.
The rebels rescue Johanna.
They bypass Enobaria's cell, too.
District Two falls, and Enobaria is informed that her parents were pulled from their house and shot.
Johanna watches the Mockingjay whisper to her bow and incite people and explosions alike as she proclaims an oncoming victory, and she seethes from her hospital bed.
Across the table, Johanna scowls at Enobaria with bruised eyes. "So what's she doing here?"
The new president informs her of the Mockingjay Pact - the captured victors' lives have been pardoned, and so even Enobaria won't stand trial.
Enobaria smiles at her, all teeth. The inside of her mouth is still raw.
"Don't look so smug. We'll kill you anyway," Johanna assures her. She won't be held to some pact that was made while she was in hell.
But when the president proposes a final Hunger Games, for once they agree on something.
"I vote yes," says Johanna.
"So do I," says Enobaria, forming the words slowly. "Let them have a taste of their own medicine."
Their eyes flash to each other when Katniss kills the new and old presidents alike and, with it, their retribution.
When Enobaria comes home, her cheeks are still swollen from the surgery. She waits in the ration line all morning for a quarter loaf of bread to scatter on the unmarked graves. She's surprised in the hollowest way to discover the family dogs have survived.
When Johanna comes home, she breathes in the heady scent of pine, gathers clothes that aren't gray, and leaves again.
Arms crossed, Enobaria leans in the doorway as her dogs bound through it.
"What are they for?" Johanna leans away from Atlas at the waist while he tips up at her. Cerberus sniffs at the knapsack at her hip. "You have enough fangs to - Oh. Well, shit."
Enobaria drops her sneer. "So have you come to try to kill me?"
"No," Johanna says, and she doesn't believe her until - "Wouldn't be a fair fight now."
The dogs sit on either side of her, their warm, boxy heads resting on her lap. They stare dolefully up at her until Johanna ruffles their neck fur.
"They're not very good guard dogs," she remarks. "Are they trained?" She waves the question away. "No, wait, that's a stupid question. Of course they are."
Instead of doing something normal like glaring, Enobaria's eyes drift down to Johanna's arms, where there are black smears at her wrists and track marks along her forearms.
Johanna tugs her sleeves to her palms. "Looks like we've both had some work done."
Enobaria's eyes now flicker to her neck, and Johanna tells herself that she's looking at the ends of her hair that don't yet scrape her shoulders.
Still, "You can speak now," she tells her, bristling and inflecting fake encouragement. "I know old habits die hard - believe me, I do - but they won't kill you for-"
Enobaria strikes out and her chair topples underneath her.
Johanna stumbles out of the chair in time but she's caught by talon-like fingernails. Enobaria grips her arms and glowers down at her - because she's bigger, and stronger, and she would've won if Johanna hadn't fled.
Johanna head-butts her chin, then pries herself away.
While Enobaria hisses in pain and the dogs bark and lope in opposite directions, Johanna stands back and waits with steadying breath.
Doubled over, Enobaria holds her mouth. Her dentures slip back into place as blood wells from the stinging cut that runs parallel to her bottom front teeth.
"Come on, then! Try me," Johanna demands overhead.
But Enobaria just pushes her tongue against clenched teeth, lets her hair fall from her shoulders to hang like a curtain between them.
"What, you can't fight without a master?" Her disparaging voice freezes into something quieter, crueler. "All these years, and you hated them, too. You're a fucking coward, Enobaria."
Silently quaking, Enobaria remembers the rockslide that buried her village's quarry before her Games. She needed to win, needed to get them through another winter.
"Say something!"
"Shut up!" she yells back, spitting blood.
Scarlet now flecking her wan face, Johanna blinks at her as Enobaria licks the acrid taste from her lips and shudders.
"For once in your life, Mason - just shut up."
"No." Her mouth is trembling, and only a fool would mistake it for sorrow instead of rage. "That's the one thing they couldn't take."
Enobaria laughs bitterly, and her mouth is wet again. She tastes the consonants, the words she's avoided for years. "That's the only thing they took from me."
Johanna rolls her eyes. "Oh, please. You weren't an Avox."
Enobaria works the rust from her throat as she volleys back, "And you weren't a martyr! You're bitter some other girl was - after you acted above the rest of us for years." Enobaria points to her lips. "I didn't want them. But there are things we must do. I don't expect you to understand that."
A wind that carries the scent of evergreen sap and death ghosts through Johanna, prickling her skin. It propels her forward; she stalks up to Enobaria, eyes blazing. "There are things you don't stand for, even if it's easier to go along with it. But I don't expect you to understand that, either."
"I don't," Enobaria admits. She shakes her head, her brow furrowed. "You knew what was at stake, and you let your own suffer all the same."
"Rumors must not reach your crowd too well," she replies through gritted teeth.
Blood runs down the corners of Enobaria's mouth, and the way it lines her chin reminds Johanna of a puppet. She wants to point and laugh but that would only be kicking a stone wall. Johanna can't seem to hurt her in the way she wants to without holding up something of a mirror between them.
She thinks Enobaria can see it, too, and she hates that even more.
"I don't care to know your sob story," says Enobaria. She turns to spit into the kitchen sink and stays there. "And you won't hear mine. You won. If you're not here to kill me, then whatever else you're looking for, you won't find it here. So leave me alone."
She's got a way with words after all, doesn't she? thinks Johanna, wryly.
"Actually, I only came here to gloat and maybe steal some lunch before the train leaves again." She backs away as her indifferent expression begins to fail. For all of Enobaria's found voice, Johanna has to have the last word: "The dogs were a nice surprise. Made up for the lack of freak-show."
Enobaria throws a bread knife at her. The blade's unbalanced and the hilt bounces off her shoulder. She turns toward the knife block before it's stopped clattering across the floor, before Johanna has finished her string of curses.
She's already heard Johanna leave when she throws the paring knife at the empty wall. It sticks and quivers in place.
Johanna hurries down the walkway but stops when she gets to the road.
She turns around - because she has spent enough time in the arena of child sacrifices and sponsor parties to know when she's being watched.
And when she's watched, she'll look right back.
Enobaria stands behind the glass door, alone in the new world she's too angry at to understand. She holds out a palm for her skittish dogs to sniff, as if to keep them there.
And Johanna stands in the road, on the right side of history, looking all the world like a strung-out vagabond. She switches her knapsack strap to another shoulder.
They look each other once over, and they think to themselves, I used to hate you... and envy you. And now I can only pity you.
They don't know that they agree on this, too.
Johanna goes everywhere else in the world, and she asks for directions without being lost. She listens when she's told stories - most of them unsolicited; everyone's still processing the war - and while she doesn't share her own, somehow it feels like she does.
Enobaria remains, and she speaks - to the ceiling, to the dogs, to the television, to strangers and neighbors and government officials.
One day, without thinking, she smiles at someone with her mouth open, and there's no flinch, no awestruck terror. It should feel like power lost but it doesn't.
And maybe it's just out of spite, like they're trying to prove the other wrong. But, they decide, without the other ever knowing, there's no real harm in that.