76.
Johanna sits on the edge of her bed and twists to stretch her back. Her muscles are sore and her hands are a mess from working with her gun, but the pain is satisfying. It feels good to work her body like it is supposed to be worked.
She lies down on her bed and closes her eyes, waiting for Katniss to finish getting ready and turn out the light. Her back actually feels okay for a change, and she was even able to wash her hands earlier. Sometimes just the sound of the water hitting the bowl of the sink is enough to get her breathing hard, and she has to rush to turn it off, closing her eyes and working through the coping mechanisms that her stupid head doctor has been trying to get her to use. But tonight she is feeling okay.
She hears the light click off and Katniss get into her own bed.
Johanna is just starting to nod off when Katniss' voice breaks the silence.
"What... What did they do to you?"
She says it quietly and hesitantly. It's clear that she has been thinking about it for a while.
Johanna rolls it around in her mind in silence. What did they do to her? They tried to kill her and break her in every way they could from the second she was reaped until the moment her broken, unconscious body was dragged out of the Capitol by the rebels. They sold her body, they killed her family, they tortured her and almost everyone she knew, they forced her to watch her district starve, they took her sanity... They, they, they. What didn't they do?
"They..." Johanna says slowly, then lapses into silence. She doesn't want to think about this anymore. Isn't that what her head doctor said? Move forward?
"They forced me to spend the rest of my life with some soppy blond who loved me no matter what I did," she says finally, sarcastically.
Katniss makes an exasperated noise on the other side of the room.
"Why do you hate me?" she asks, plaintively.
"What is it with you? Why do you care?" Johanna shoots back. "I'm not your mom. Not everyone has to like you, you know."
"Besides," she says quietly after a pause, "I don't even hate you."
"Well you certainly don't like me," Katniss responds.
"Yeah. I don't." Johanna rolls onto her side, facing away from Katniss and tries to fall back asleep, but she can feel Katniss expectantly waiting in the silence.
"It's not like I owe you anything..." she mutters as turns again to face Katniss' bed.
"Okay, so part of it is your annoying holier-than-thou routine with the wanting to save every broken doll and injured bird, and part of it is that you are so important that I am supposed to get my ass killed to save you. But mostly it's your attitude like you are the only person who got a shitty deal in this world."
"You walked into the ground floor of the Remake Center that first day, never having met another Victor but your own mentor, and acted like we were the assholes."
"Guess what sweetheart," she continues, putting mocking emphasis on Haymitch's word, "the rest of us were reaped too. The rest of saw the ugliness of the Capitol and the President much more starkly, much more viciously than you ever did. You looked at us like we were freaks, but you had no idea. Look at Finnick-"
"I know about Finnick," Katniss says quietly into the dark.
"Not just that," Johanna says, exasperated. "You think that because he is from a career district, because he is one of the youngest winners in history, because he had sponsors, that his Games were different from yours. That they weren't as bad. Well you know what is really means to be the youngest winner of the Games? It means that he stood up on that stage, fourteen, in a career district, and no one volunteered for him. Not the few that actually did train seriously, not any of the people who knew his mother was sick, not anyone."
"His mother was sick?" Katniss asks, not really expecting an answer.
"There are things you still don't know about us, Mockingjay. Have you ever thought about how many parents all of us victors in Thirteen have between us? It's one. Your mother."
"We still don't know about Annie's-"
"Yeah," Johanna interrupts, "I am sure they are just fine, sitting in their old house in East Shore, eating caviar and definitely not getting stormed by a Peacekeeper army."
Katniss stays quiet.
"Look, just..." Johanna's tone has softened. She doesn't know why she is attacking the girl. She is only seventeen, of course everything is about her. And her life has been impossibly hard. And there is an impossibly large amount riding on her slender shoulders.
"We're all dealing with our own shit, okay? As best we can," she pauses. "And you could try cutting Crazymutt Mellark some slack."
She and Annie probably know best what that boy went through, how hard he fought, how long it took for them to break him down. How much he loves her.
"Now I need to get some sleep if I am going kick your ass in the run tomorrow."
"I can't believe Johanna Mason is telling me about who to cut some slack," Katniss says under her breath. "And you are going to need more than a good night's sleep to beat me."
Johanna smiles as she twists back onto her back. The girl might be okay after all.
She hears the water before she sees it, dripping, swirling, rushing, down the fake streets toward her.
"This isn't going to be good," she thinks to herself just before the dark wall of water reaches her.
It slides over her feet, soaking through her socks and up the hem of her pants, reaching her ankles, all in an instant.
The voice of her fake squadron leader is shouting orders in her ear, but she can't move. It is taking all her strength to keep her eyes locked on the building in front of her and breathe, but the second the water touches her bare skin, and she can feel the ripple of the fabric of her pants flitting against her leg in the swirl of the water, she knows she can't hang on.
They are back, and it is going to be the last time. She can't do it anymore, she can't fight anymore; they have beaten her. She is already in the water, shaking, waiting for the shocks to come, waiting for the fire to tear its way through her body, so she curls up on herself and waits for death to finally, mercifully, take her.
She comes to back in the hospital slowly, through the familiar, heavy haze of morphling. She tries to remember how she got here, back to the beginning, as if the last couple of weeks never happened, when she remembers the water. She is so tired, it seems complete psychotic breaks will do that to a person, but she knows that she can't risk closing her eyes. She doesn't know what awaits her in her dreams.
The door to her hospital room is pushed open slowly, but before she can brace herself for whatever new horror is coming for her, she sees Finnick's familiar face.
He looks worried.
He comes up to her and runs his hand softly over her forehead and through the stubble of her hair. Just the soft touch of someone else, someone who cares about her, is enough to make her eyes fill with tears.
"Hey Jo," he says softly, looking down at her.
She hates herself for tearing, for being so soft, so easy.
"So I guess you are going to get there first after all," she says hoarsely after a moment.
"Guess so," he says quietly. Then he gets in next to her on the bed, which is angled in a half sitting position, and pulls her close to him. "Guess so."
They lay there together in silence for a moment.
"We were always in this together," he says thoughtfully before the silence stretches on too long.
"And now I won't be there," she says in response. She tears again. She isn't sure what is going on. It must be all the drugs they have her on.
"It would have been better if you were coming too," he says. "Better for me, I mean. Better for the rebellion. But you need to fix yourself first. We all asked too much of you. You yourself most of all. Rely too much on the strongest and use them up."
She can't help the tear that escapes her full eyes.
"I lied, you know, in the Arena," she says, her voice quavering a little, "When I said-"
"I know," he says over her, not letting her finish the thought. He drops his cheek onto her head, warm and comforting and solid.
"You just get better so I won't feel bad gloating about how I killed the president while you lay wallowing in a hospital bed, okay?" he says after a minute, pushing himself back up and out of her bed.
"Katniss is supposed to come by any second. She wants to see how you are doing."
"Well, I don't really want to see her," Johanna shoots back, quick, like herself.
"Shut up," Finnick says back with a knowing smile. "Don't try to pretend you don't like her with me. I've seen right through that attitude of yours from day one."
"Don't tell me to shut up," she says, but she closes her eyes with a small smile as she drops her head back against her pillow.
He looks at her lying in her bed, small and wiry, and stripped of all her costumes and attitude. He grasps her hand and kisses her forehead gently.
"Love you, Miss Mason."
Her eyes snap open.
"Don't go doing anything stupid like dying," she says suddenly, fiercely.
"Don't worry," he says, trademark smile on his lips, "I'm a Victor."
He pauses in the doorway for a long second, looking back at her, before he is gone.
The days go by slowly in the hospital. Johanna goes through therapy everyday with the same doctor that she never trusted from before, but there is nothing motivating her like there was before. There is no chance that she is going to go to the Capitol, there is no chance she is going to kill President Snow, there is no chance that she will do anything for the rebel cause.
She wants to just lay back and let the morphling run through her and dull all her senses. She wants to be like Evangeline and Iskander were, high and uncaring and protected from reality by a warm cocoon of pharmaceuticals, but they won't give her even that in this underground hell hole.
They wean her off the drugs, and she goes thudding down once again to reality, but they can't make her care about anything. They force her to stand in the bathroom as they run water into the sink, slowly trying to accustom her to the noise. They have to sedate her to get her into the bath.
Once in a while she slips out of her hospital room to wander the halls, slipping through doors behind people, turning quickly down abandoned pathways. She usually remembers to pull on some pants. It means she is less likely to be immediately flagged as a crazy-ward escapee.
She has spent days, weeks in this state, weeks that have felt like months, when she sees the breaking news report from the Capitol.
The pictures flash by on the television screen, just like they would in the sky in the arena, the television crew, that one soldier from Thirteen, the cousin, Finnick, Peeta, the Mockingjay. All dead.
Johanna watches President Snow's eulogy for the Mockingjay and the rebellion, and then watches President Coin's same eulogy from the other direction. There is something in the made up, painted face of Katniss that they show in front of a burning background that twists something inside of Johanna, that makes her want for an instant to get up and fight for her cause.
She knows they are manipulating her with their images, but there is something to that girl all the same. Because she doesn't believe it for a second, that all of them are gone at once, and she won't believe it until she sees their bodies laid out in front of her.
She lies down on her bed to try to lose herself in a dreamless sleep and is laying there, eyes closed but mind still awake, when she hears someone come into her room.
She cracks open one eye.
"Annie," she says, with a hint of surprise.
"You weren't sleeping, were you?" Annie asks, concerned as always.
"Nope."
"You saw the report?"
"Yup."
Annie sits down in the chair opposite the door, and the two of them sit there in silence.
"I don't believe it either," she says after a couple of minutes.
Johanna nods but stays silent.
They sit together a while longer, neither of them saying anything but both understanding all the same. When Annie gets up to go, Johanna swings her feet down to the floor and catches her hand as she passes by. They give each other a quick squeeze before letting go.
Annie comes back the next day.
It surprises Johanna that Annie can sit and watch the coverage of the war that is happening in the Capitol, especially with the shifting reports on who is dead and who isn't. Especially with Finnick. But Johanna doesn't question it. Who can say why any of them are as crazy or as sane as they are?
It is the fourth day of the two of them sitting and watching the coverage together when they see it. The television is showing a report about the evacuation of the Capitol citizens to the city center, when it is interrupted by a message saying that they had recovered the body of one of the rebel leaders. And then Finnick's face is on the screen again, larger than life but just as beautiful.
Annie and Johanna's hands find each other instinctively as the report continues, detailing Finnick's rise to fame as a Victor and subsequent fall under the thrall of rebels. They have so many pictures of him, eleven years of pictures of him, but none of them really look like him. Not like he really is.
The slowly mounting pain in Johanna's hand is the only thing that calls her back to the other woman in the room. She turns to her now, looking at her face, which is sickly white with eyes open wide in horror. The grip she has on her hand is a death grip.
"Hey, Annie. Annie. Hey." Johanna says as she turns the girl's head toward her and softly pushes a strand of her dark hair away from her face.
But when Annie looks up at her with panic in her eyes, Johanna realizes that there is nothing she can say. There are no words that will make this any better, and as she realizes this, looking into Annie's eyes, Johanna's face crumples and quick tears make their way down her cheeks.
In a second, Annie's face is blank and her scream is the sound of a heart breaking, a horrible noise that Johanna heard once before, blunted by television speakers.
Nurses and orderlies come running into the room, bringing with them the brisk noises of people doing their jobs, as if this were any other day, as if everything was still the same. They pry Johanna's hand out of Annie's, breaking their connection, to wheel her out of the room, and Johanna is left alone once again, in a starched white bed in an anonymous room with crushing pain threatening to suffocate her.
A/N: I have completely bummed myself out so I will have to take this someplace at least a little happier. Thanks again to everyone who has reviewed!