FIC: après moi le déluge (The Hunger Games, Johanna Mason/Annie Cresta, PG-13)
SUMMARY: After me comes the flood.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Written for thinlizzy2 for Every Woman 2016. Spoilers for everything.
She was named Johanna for her maternal grandmother. The woman died thirty years before Johanna’s birth, falling from the treetops to the hard ground below. Johanna knows her from pictures-but only grey, posed photographs, nothing of the accident. Even as a child, Johanna wonders what her grandmother looked like when she hit the ground-if her joints had cracked open, her limbs at odd angles like a doll’s, if the wind blew her hair back, if her eyes were opened or closed.
Johanna doesn’t imagine the fall. She already knows what it was like. Like flying.
Mason is her family name, her father’s name. “A mason,” he explains, his big rough hands cupping hers, “is a builder. He makes things from stone.”
Everything in District 7 is made of wood. The only exception is the dam, which is made of concrete.
Annie won the Games before Johanna’s by being able to swim the longest when the arena’s dam burst. Johanna watched with her family in their small wood house in District 7, watched as the concrete gave way-how for a moment, there was just a spider web of cracks, a trickle of water, and then, without warning, the side of the dam blew out, and there was nothing but wave after wave of water. The water was stronger than anything else in the arena; it splintered the structures, eroded the earth, and made kindling of the trees.
Annie’s skin is always cool, like she’s just been pulled from the water. She is as soft and pale and fragrant as a water lily, and Johanna worries that she’ll tear Annie’s delicate flesh with the rough pads of her hands. Everything about Johanna is rough. She resists sanding; when the prep team gets its hands on her, they apply lipstick to a snarl.
It is her first Games as a mentor that Johanna meets Annie. Johanna has the fizz of a cocktail and the taste of rare meat on her tongue; her sharp eyes move across the crowd, identifying, classifying. Complacency is dangerous. Annie is strangely still among the bustle of the crowd. She is wearing a silk dress that is pale blue and slightly radiant beneath the twinkling lights of the Capital. It bares her back from neck to hips, but somehow she doesn’t seem uncovered, even as Johanna’s eyes run over the knuckles of her spine. Later Johanna drags her fingers down the dips and ridges of Annie’s backbone, Annie’s mouth parted, a long exhalation tearing from her lips. Johanna’s hands slide underneath the slippery silk of Annie’s dress, and Annie watches her move with her languid sea green eyes. Annie isn’t a flincher, either. It’s something they share.
Johanna was not afraid when they called her name for the Games. She was furious. Her lungs filled with a scream, but even then she recognized that her anger would be a detriment to her survival. She bit her tongue, lowered her eyes, and let the Peacekeepers escort her to the stage. She wilted beneath the lights, the cameras, the gaze of Panem. All the while, her hands itched for an axe. She faked sweet until she curled her fingers around the handle’s throat, the axe an extension of her arm, the weight of the blade just the weight of the bones in her arm. The tribute from District 6 cracked open with the same noise as a tree trunk, and the blood hadn’t bothered her a bit.
Annie doesn’t watch the Games anymore. When they meet, Johanna has her at a disadvantage, because Annie had not watched Johanna’s Hunger Games. She had never seen her on camera, only now, Joanna’s mouth curving into a grin and her rough fingers grasping the crystal stem of a champagne flute as she offers it to the sweet girl with the auburn hair who had won her Hunger Games without spilling a drop of blood.
Maybe Johanna had started as the predator, but it stopped being like that when Annie met her eyes, when she smiled her uneasy smile and grazed Johanna’s fingers with her own as she took the glass from her. Trees were strong, but water could fell them. Johanna felt herself bend, and she did everything she could to hold on.
In the Districts, loving was losing. One by one, the Capital hewed at the things Johanna loved. The more she resisted, the more they took. She tried to craft her skin into steel, her heart into stone. She did everything she could not to love, but the nature of water is that it is patient. It runs over stone until the stone gives way. Annie never asks for anything from her, not even her love, but no matter how hard Johanna pushes, Annie just flows back. Every day, Johanna trudges up the hill to the Victor’s Village, to the place where the trees thin and you can see the sun. She walks into her empty house. She takes down the pictures of the people who have gone, from the baby pictures of her brother to the old photographs of her grandmother before the fall. Showing weakness is only useful if there is strength to hide behind it.
You never really leave the arena. No one wins the Hunger Games. And just like the Games, life in the districts is not about death. It is about control. It is about fear and the tiny shred of hope, that light peeking through the keyhole. And the thing about hope is that you can’t kill it. That light can be dimmed, but never extinguished. There is no way to turn your heart to stone.
Johanna knows. She’s tried.
Those rare nights together, Annie curls up on Johanna’s chest, skin to skin. Johanna lies awake, watching the moonlight on the ceiling, holding Annie and holding on.