Disclaimer: The Hunger Games and its characters are all property of Suzanne Collins. No profit is being made from this piece of work. No copyright infringement is intended.
12
I'm getting used to the familiar ache of waking up after I've been knocked out. I don't even bother to groan in pain as my eyes adjust to my surroundings. I am, however, completely unused to the feeling of my memories rushing back to me; the wolf, the flying object I now remember as an axe, something pressing my face into the dirt.
I'm in a log cabin. The fire is crackling and a cat sits on the arm of the sofa which I lie on. It's gray with green eyes and its watching me so intently I squirm under its gaze.
"Sorry I had to do that to you, hon," a female voice I don't recognize talks to me. For a confusing moment, I think it's the cat but after turning my head painfully to the side I see I am not alone.
A woman with straggly brown hair sits in an armchair on the other side of the room, watching me like the cat.
"I didn't know who you were," she goes on, getting up and walking over to me.
Suddenly I'm aware there's nothing covering me put a thin blanket. Where the hell are all my clothes?
"I'm washing your clothes," she tells me as though she can read my mind. My eyes widen in mortification. It's not like she's a doctor or anything. She cackles. "Don't be so shy," she tells me. "I wasn't about to leave you in those rags whether you wanted your dignity spared or not."
"Who are you?" I demand.
She regards me with sympathetic eyes. "You don't remember me do you?" she says sadly. "Not that I expect you to. I haven't seen you since you were this big." She pushes her hand towards the ground, creating the height of a three-year-old. "I'd popped by to see Annie and you were running all over the place with hair as crazy as if you'd been electrocuted." She pauses. "Saying that, Annie was going through a rough time – maybe you did get electrocuted. It would explain were you got all that energy for running around from. She just charged you like a battery!"
"Excuse me?" I ask shocked. I sit up, remember my predicament and pull the blanket higher to cover my chest.
"I'm sorry, Finnick Odair Jr." she says, stressing my name. "I'm Johanna Mason but you had a habit of call me JoJo despite that fact I only saw you once." She cackles again.
"Johanna Mason," I mumble, trying to think where I had heard the name before.
"I'm on that special list of yours," she says proudly.
Of course! The list Gale gave me. Wow. I've made it District 7 already?
I look Johanna over. Her hair makes her look like a witch but her baggy plaid shirt and big brown boots tell me otherwise.
"Why did you hit me?" I ask.
"Well, I didn't know who you were!" she says defensively. "For all I knew you were in legion with the wolves. I think it's breeding time for them you know. They've killed about five of my cats already." As if in agreement, the gray cat meows. "That's right, Pompo," Johanna says to the cat, nodding.
Pompo…in legion with the wolves…implying my own mother electrocuted me. I think Johanna has lost it over the years.
"What you doing here anyway?" she asks, dropping down to the floor in front of me. "I don't get visitors often and you didn't even know who I was so clearly you're not here to see me."
I was out in the woods when Johanna found – no, attacked – me. That should tell her I wasn't here to visit anybody but she can't understand that.
"Haven't you seen the television?" I ask her. I didn't know what story the Capitol had spun but I wanted to see how Plutarch has explained his sudden rise to Presidency, what the public think has happened to me, and most importantly what has happened to Gale.
Johanna jumps to her feet as soon as I mention television and hisses at me like a cat. "Television is evil," she tells me as though she's warning me. "I don't have anything to do with it anymore." She pauses again. "I used to be in the Hunger Games you know."
"I know," I sigh. She looks like a frightened child now.
"They hurt me," she mumbles quietly. "And then there was a war, did you hear?" I nod. "Your daddy died in that war. I didn't think that was fair. I have no family you see. Finnick was my only friend. I wish that Enobaria bitch had died instead of your daddy."
I want to agree with her but since I don't know who Enobaria is, I don't think it will be fair.
"Johanna," I say. She frowns at me. I sigh, "JoJo." At that she grins.
"Yes?" she asks.
"Can I have some clothes?"
"Why?" she asks, confused. "Do you not like being naked? I could get naked too so you're not on your own." I think she's joking until she reaches for the buttons on her shirt.
"No!" I cry. "Please, I'm cold."
"Oh!" she cries. "Well, obviously, that is the reason we made clothes! I'll be right back."
She leaves the room and as soon as she's gone it's like the energy as gone with her. I exchange a long look with Pompo, and wonder how long Johanna has been alone. She can't have lost it altogether as, by the looks of the axe hung on the wall and the way it hit that wolf, she's still a fighter.
"Here you go!" she announces, running back in the room with an armful of clothes. She dumps them on top of me but doesn't turn away.
"Erm, JoJo?"
"Yes?"
"Can I have some privacy?"
"But I've already seen it all."
"Please!" I beg, burying my face in my hands.
She rolls her eyes. "Well, okay, fussy-body, come in the kitchen when you're all covered and I'll fix you some broth."
The thought of a hot meal after a week of eating cold fish makes my mouth water and my stomach rumble.
"And I ain't stupid," she tells me as though she's warning me again. "I know you still haven't told me why you're here."
She leaves the room, closing the door behind her.
"And don't mind Pompo!" she calls loudly through the wood of the door. "He's seen it all too!"
(*)
I'm on my third helping of broth by the time I'm done reciting my story to Johanna. I haven't told her everything because, like my mother, she has a fragile mind and I don't want to scare her. I don't even think she knows the Hunger Games have come back. So I tell her the government wants me and Gale helped me to escape and now I'm on my way to District 12.
"Don't eat too much," she warns me. "When I came out of the arena, they told me if I ate too much my stomach would explode."
I push the broth away from me.
It's sad that Johanna can still remember so many bad memories. The way she recites them in her childish voice reminds me of my mother so much. And it makes her stories all the more worse.
"Is Gale the pretty one?" she asks me. I think of Gale's scarred face and sad eyes.
"I wouldn't know," I tell her, thinking that maybe he had been pretty when Johanna had known him.
"Oh, of course you wouldn't!" she says as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. "You probably have a girlfriend!"
She gets up and takes my bowl to the sink. I throw my arms up in the air in frustration, unable to keep up with her conversation though I make sure they're back on the table by the time she turns around again.
"So, what are you going to do now?" she asks me.
I look outside the log cabin window. The sun is setting. Would it be rude to ask to stay the night?
"I have a spare room if you need to rest before you continue your quest," she says, cackling at her own rhyme. Johanna Mason scares me.
Her spare room turns out to be occupied – by her two dozen cats. A crowd of brown, gray, black and white fur greets me as I enter the room.
"Don't mind the kids!" she calls from her own room. "They don't bite!"
But they do scratch as I discovered when I woke up the next morning.
Johanna is in the kitchen, already cooking something on the stove when I walk in. Pancakes. I think.
"Good morning, Finnick Odair Jr.," she says.
"It's just Fin," I tell her.
"Fin?" she questions. "Like a fin from a fish? Well, that's suitable." She cackles again before dumping a plate of – pancakes? – in front of me on the table. She joins me minutes later with her own plate.
"You have to go today don't you?" she pouts like a child.
"Yes, I do," I tell her. "But thank you for taking care of me."
"I had to!" she says defensively. "I was the one who hit who remember?"
"What did you hit me with?" I ask, rubbing the back of my skull. The spot is a bit tender but it's nothing too serious. Not compared with what I've suffered from the Katniss and the guards at the Capitol.
"My fist," she says, swiping a punch at me from across the table. I tell myself she missed on purpose though, by the crazed look in her eyes, I'm not sure she did. "I can still fight you know." She sounds like a lost little girl at that last bit despite her weathered face.
"I'm sure you can," I tell her as though I am talking to an infant.
The lost, crazed expression falls from her face only to be replaced by anger. She stands and throws her wooden chair across the kitchen. I stand in shock, completely taken aback by this sudden change of character.
"They killed them you know!" she cries running round the table and standing so her face is inches from mine. "They took every one of them and they killed them, all because I wouldn't do as they wanted."
I don't know what she's talking about but her madness is similar to what my mother's was.
"I can't get the blood off me, Fin! It's still there no matter how much I bathe." Then she would hold her arms up to me as if showing me the blood. The only blood I used to see were hers where she'd scrubbed so hard in the water that she'd taken some skin off.
Now Johanna glares at me in range. So I do the only thing I know to do; the only thing I did with my mother. I wrap my arms around her. I was only eight when I did this to my mother so it was more like a hugging of the legs but I'm older now and taller than Johanna. I pull her close to me to protect her from her thoughts, wishing I could still do the same to my mother.
"I didn't want to assassinate people," Johanna sobs into my shoulder. "I didn't want to…" She trails off and I try my best to ignore what she's saying. I've worked out that the Capitol killed all of Johanna's family but I don't want to know why.
Eventually she calms down enough for me to put her back into her bed as she falls asleep. I don't want to leave Johanna. She reminds me so much of my mother but I have no choice. The only way I can help her now is to get to District 12.
"I'll come back, JoJo," I tell her. She mumbles something in her sleep.
I take some food from Johanna's kitchen. Not much but just enough to get me through another couple of days. I don't want to take anything from Johanna but I I'm beginning to worry that the fish in the stream won't sustain me or I may find myself having to go off course. If I follow the stream the entire way then I'll end up near the ocean. District 12 is not near the ocean.
Luckily for me, Johanna's house is at the edge of the woods so I sneak out of District 7 unseen. The large poles that used to hold up barbed wire concealing the people inside still stand though the wire was torn down years ago. Something else I remember from History class.
The following days and nights are spent mostly in my head. I can't stop thinking about what led me here, about how Johanna got how she is – crazy one minute, homicidal the other – how my mother could walk into the sea and just leave me like she did.
I smell District 12 before I see it. The medicine factory gives off a distinctive odor of burning grass and concentrated pollen. As I part the bushes to step into the District from the woods, I feel like I've reached heaven.
I've only been to District 12 once before with Gale but the five months I spent here made me feel more at home than I'd ever felt in the Capitol. It's the look of the people I see as I walk down the streets. You can tell they belong here by their weathered faces just as you can tell I belong in District 4 by my lean build. The Capitol isn't home to anybody; it's just a mixture of different people trying to be who they're not.
But this? The natural beauty of all of this is wonderful. I smile at every face that looks at me as I make my way over to Katniss' home. I'm drunk off relief. After nearly two months of travelling I am here. I realize then that a lot of faces are looking at me.
A hand grabs my arm and pulls me into a shop when I walk through the town. I'm immediately hit by the smell of warm bread and I breathe it in with a sigh; I'm in a bakery. A lovely, warm toasty bakery.
"Fin, snap out of it!" Peeta Mellark's voice awakens me from my drunken state. His usually welcoming tone is now hard and vicious.
"What is it?" I ask, suddenly alarmed. I look down and realize I'm still dressed in the black pants and green plaid shirt that Johanna gave me. I look slightly muddy but I'm not that un-presentable that he should be angry with me.
"What are you doing here?" he asks.
"Gale sent me," I tell him, not ignoring the look of shock that crosses over his feature when I mention Gale's name. "I need to talk to Katniss."
"There's no need," Peeta tells me. He drops his hands from my shoulders and steps back. I notice he's wearing a white apron over his clothes. So he's the District baker then. "We already know Plutarch's took control of the country. If you bring it up again to Katniss it'll only upset her even more."
I nod, understanding that Plutarch had once been a good guy – a friend of Katniss. "Any news on Gale?" I ask though my heart already knows what he's going to say before he says it.
Peeta straightens up as if in respect. "General Gale Hawthorne was executed live on television last week."