fic: history books forgot about us (the hunger games)
Title: history books forgot about us
Fandom: the hunger games
Pairing: johanna/finnick
Word Count: 3656
Disclaimer: i don't own 'em, suzanne collins does
Summary: happy endings are bullshit; they're two broken people doing the best they can. AKA that AU where finnick lives, annie dies, and johanna is troubled.
After the revolution, things are quiet. The world doesn’t quite return to normal, but it makes its best attempt, and slowly, life becomes livable.
Finnick and Annie return to District 4, nursing their injuries but otherwise safe and sound.
The following year, Annie falls ill. There aren’t many healers in the districts after the war - the Peacekeepers made certain to destroy the lion’s share of them during the rebellion - and there are particularly few in the far-flung reaches of the outer districts. Without real medicine, she can only hold on for so long.
Annie Cresta Odair - victor, rebel, wife - dies with a hacking cough and tears in her eyes as Finnick strokes her hair.
They give her a burial at sea.
And then Finnick falls apart.
Johanna arrives for the funeral that summer, skinny and spindly and out of place among the bronze-skinned, bronze-haired citizens of 4. She stands back at the edge of the crowd during the funeral, staring at the waves, watching the strangers weep for the Cresta girl, the tenuous little thing who survived so much in such a short lifetime.
“She was so strong,” Johanna overhears one woman say to another.
“One of the strongest I ever knew,” her friend whispers back. “It’s too bad, though, she went a little mad at the end…”
Johanna wants to snap back at these strangers. As if you’d know, she wants to yell, you never saw her like I did. You didn’t sit in a cell in the Capitol, listening to her scream as they tortured her naked for information she didn’t have. You were never there when she fell apart. You didn’t go to her wedding and see her at her happiest. You didn’t know her.
One of the strangers turns to her, and Johanna prays they won’t recognize her. Her hair has grown long (well, longer) from sheer negligence, and she’s even thinner than she was the last time they saw her on TV - the morphling will do that to you, turn you into skin and bones. She hides her face the best she can as the stranger asks, “How did you know our Annie?”
Our Annie. As if you’d know. “We were acquaintances,” says Johanna as politely as she can, assuming it’s a better answer than “We were prisoners of war together for a short time.” Satisfied, the women turn away, and Johanna slips away from them, dodging and weaving through the crowd until she’s beside Finnick.
“Hi.”
He turns to her. Looks at her in disbelief. Finally he speaks. “I can’t believe you came.”
She laughs a little. “Why wouldn’t I? I went through hell with Annie. It’s the least I could do to come pay my respects.”
“All the way from 7, though.”
“2, actually.”
“Really?” He seems surprised. “What are you doing there?”
“Nothing important.”
A well-wisher taps him on the arm and he turns away to exchange a few words. When the stranger moves on, he turns back to Johanna. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I just - “
“No, it’s okay,” Johanna says. “I should go, anyway. I just wanted to say hello.”
“No, you don’t have to,” says Finnick. “Come back to the house. We can catch up.” Johanna hesitates, but he presses on. “Please. I haven’t seen you since -“ He doesn’t finish the sentence. Since the war, since he was left for dead. Johanna never went to see him. It wasn’t until the Everdeen Coup, as the history books were bound to call it, that she even knew he was still alive.
“Okay,” she finds herself saying. “I’d like that.”
They return to his house; the same modest little home in the Victors’ Village he’d lived in all those years before. “It’s the place where Annie and I fell in love,” he offers by way of explanation. “It’s a home.”
They sit on the couch and they both have a drink, discussing the weather, politics, anything but Annie and the memories the three of them shared. It’s not that they’re scared to touch the topics, not really, but it troubles them both to discuss the past in its immediacy. In several years, perhaps, but not now, not while every pod explosion and electric shock rings so clearly in their minds.
(Yet Johanna can sense that Finnick is equally reluctant to think about the future. Annie was all he had; his only support system in the world. His parents are long dead, killed by the Capitol after his little secret-reveal on TV. It’s just Finnick now, alone in this house paid for in the blood of children all those years ago.)
They talk idly about the present, then, and they drink.
A few hours later, the doorbell rings and Finnick freezes.
He can’t move. He stands in the kitchen, dumbstruck, blinking and unmoving.
Johanna hurries to the door, opens it. It’s a child, no more than 12 or 13, carrying a basket of bread. “I’m sorry,” she says, as politely as she can. “Finnick isn’t really in a state to receive visitors right now. Can I take a message?”
The child hands him the bread. “From the Gusteaxs,” he says, and she nods. “I’ll tell him you came,” she says, and closes the door.
“Johanna -”
She turns and sees Finnick across the hall, staring daggers into her. “Sorry,” she says, “you weren’t moving -”
“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s just funny. I’ve just never seen you be so nice to a child. Never pegged you for the maternal type.”
She snorts. “That’s because I’m not,” she says, handing him the bread. “I’m never having kids.”
“Well, who would?” he says quietly. “Especially after - ”
“Yeah.” Neither of them finishes the thought.
As Finnick relaxes visibly, Johanna awkwardly heads for the door. “I should probably get going,” she says, “I have a long train ride back to 2. It’s been really, ah.” She pauses. “I’ve really enjoyed seeing you again. And I hate that it’s under these circumstances.”
Finnick shakes his head. “You can stay overnight. The train will be there tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to put you out,” she says, crossing her arms defensively. “You’ve been through so much lately, I don’t -”
“Johanna.” He looks so, so very tired in this light, much older than his 26 years. “Look. When I was young, any time there was a death in the family, everyone would go out of their way to make the survivors feel less alone. You couldn’t have a cousin die without everyone running over with some sort of meal. Not anymore.” He looks around the room, shrinking in plain sight, trapped and scared and alone, and Johanna, suddenly, understands. “You’re the closest thing I have to family now, and that scares me, Johanna. But I really wouldn’t mind it if you stayed.”
She sighs. There is nothing else she can say. She can’t leave him now. And yet to act put-upon would be, well, an act. She came here for a reason. Somehow, after everything they’ve been through, she still cares about Finnick Odair more than she cares about most other humans. “If I’m your only family,” she says wryly, “good fucking luck.”
For the first time in weeks, he laughs. For the first time in years, he laughs at Johanna.
+
The first time they meet, they are both 16 - Finnick very old for his age and Johanna very young; he having won two years before and she, the newly crowned victor, beginning her tour of duty in the Capitol, all tarted up and ready for auction, teetering on her unsteady high heels with a glass of something that an older woman had pressed into her hand with a knowing look.
He gives her an affable smile at the party. “Good luck,” he says.
She shakes it off. She isn’t meant to be here. She isn’t a Career, raised from birth with the intent of making it here, to the Capitol, to be delivered to older men and women who want a night with danger. She refuses to believe that this is real; that she isn’t dreaming in bed at home in 7, terrified but safely asleep.
And she doesn’t need luck from Finnick Odair.
The Capitol doesn’t agree with her. She can handle the rough ones, who want her hands around their throats as they fuck, who want her to hit them and make them scream. She can escape into this, hit them so hard her hands bruise, choke them until their faces turn blue (though with the Capitol makeup trends, this is sometimes more dangerous than one would expect). She kills them over and over again and then lets them walk free, accepting whatever gifts they have to offer - the jewelry goes in a pile, never worn; the money she tucks into her lingerie; the flowers wilting and rotting in their vases, never watered.
It’s the ones who want to talk afterward that get to her. The teenage boys she deflowers, letting them kiss her and pretending it didn’t make her want to vomit. She hears the rumors about the others (the brother and sister who can be bought and sold together; the beautiful Career girls for whom the Gamemakers fix the arena in hopes of being their first), but it seems that nothing could be worse than the gilded, grotesque hell she lives in.
Finnick, as it turns out, isn’t so bad. Their apartments are adjacent, separated by only a single door, and on the worst nights, they pour each other cocktails (the worse the customer, the stronger the liquor) and drink themselves into oblivion, talking about everything and nothing, the way two people do when the curiosity is mutual. The way they do when this curiosity borders on something much more sinister; something like attraction.
Finnick has a girl at home. Her name is Annie Cresta and she is beautiful, fragile, the kind of girl you can’t help wanting to protect. Johanna doesn’t have a boy at home, and this is probably for the better, says Finnick: “At least you don’t have to constantly worry.”
“What could they do to her?” she slurs, four drinks in and nowhere near stopping. These days, she doesn’t quit until she’s out cold; twice this week she’s woken up with a pounding headache and half a bottle of vodka spilling out of her hand onto the silk sheets of her bed.
Finnick shakes his head. “I don’t want to think about it.”
They only sleep together once, and it’s at the behest of a client, a higher-up in the Snow administration who points at both of them, mumbling to the auctioneer, “I want those two, together.”
She gets sloppy drunk beforehand. She doesn’t remember the night. She can only sense that Finnick is painfully sober - he can’t drink before; they won’t give him drugs to help him get it up.
They are seventeen.
Finnick makes a mistake. Finnick steps out of line and angers a client a month before the Reaping.
“Annie Cresta,” says the Capitol escort, and no one volunteers.
Johanna pours herself another drink. She’s a mentor this year for the first time and she’s tasked with teaching her tributes how to kill this girl. Is it better or worse than just letting them die? She honestly couldn’t be fucked either way. There’s so little she cares about now - she just goes on existing, letting her customers do whatever they want to her.
She would give anything for a way out.
+
Annie Cresta is dead. Annie Cresta is dead and Johanna is in District 4, barely awake on Finnick’s couch, awake in the middle of the night, roused by Annie’s screams in her nightmares. She can’t shake the sound of shrieking that rattles in her brain, Annie’s panicked, animalistic yelps mixed with cries for Finnick, her mother, her father, anyone.
In this block of cells at the Capitol, Annie screamed for Finnick and Peeta screamed for Katniss and Johanna had no one to scream for.
In the morning, she lies silently on the couch until Finnick appears from the bedroom. “Hey,” he says. “I’m glad you’re still here.”
She shoots him a look. “What, did you think I’d run off in the middle of the night?”
“I never know with you,” he says. He’s probably telling the truth.
They don’t do much that day. They share the bread from the neighbor boy - Mags’ grandson, Finnick says, with a pained look - and sit outside in the yard, set on a cliff over the ocean, watching the waves roll in on the beach and not speaking. It’s the first time Johanna has ever seen him here at home in 4, but she imagines him to have been markedly different as a child - young and full of life, wielding a trident gleefully like the teenagers jumping around in the water below. She remembers watching his games, remembers the young, handsome boy he was then; nothing like the man who sits beside her, old and defeated in his mid-twenties, a scar running across his cheek and a powerful limp breaking his stride when he walks.
(She knows she’s not the person she was before, either: stick thin with sallow skin and cheekbones that protrude more than ever, track marks from her morphling days still visible on her arms. War is hell, or so goes the old chestnut; they’re just living proof.)
The train bound for District 2 comes and goes. She doesn’t get on. There is so much unfinished business left here.
+
Annie is reaped and Finnick is her mentor. Johanna can tell, even from afar, that this is what one might call “deep shit.”
To her credit, she doesn’t say a word. She keeps to herself during the training period, offering a few words of encouragement to her scrawny little tributes. Useless things. They die in the bloodbath, both of them, and she shrugs it off and pours herself another drink, sitting on the seventh floor alone.
The games run long this year. Everyone is bored. After the initial kills, the remaining half of the tributes simply aren’t entertaining; they spend more time hiding from each other than fighting. A week and a half in, they’re at a party, all the mentors, bored out of their wits, and she watches Finnick strut up to the head Gamemaker, giving him those come-fuck-me eyes and saying words she can’t hear from the distance between them.
The earthquake breaks the dam and Annie treads water until it's all over. She is crowned in front of the nation, her eyes wide, darting around the room like a small animal in a trap.
The Games are a welcome respite from the circuit, but after the finale, the mentors are back on the market.
Johanna has been plotting this for months. She can’t exist in this world anymore. The man asks her, as they always do, to choke him; it’s become something of a gimmick for her. This time she holds on until he slumps, lifeless, to the floor.
(It is worth noting, here, that human beings are the only creatures who strangle. To kill, one must usually let go of their humanity and succumb to the most animal instincts within them; to choke the life out of someone and feel their last breath leave them underneath your bare hands, however - that’s the most base, human thing one can possibly do.)
“I’m sorry,” she says breathlessly, “I didn’t mean to - I couldn’t tell, I honestly thought he would be fine.” They discharge her from the Capitol and send her home to 7; when she arrives, her mother, father, and brothers’ bodies line the floor of the little house in Victor’s Village, blood trickling from the single bulletholes on each of their foreheads.
She sees Finnick once a year after this; and each year at the Tribute Parade, they exchange a few words and that is all.
And then she hears about a revolution.
+
She stays. They lose track of the days; they turn into weeks which fold into months. Finnick is almost catatonic, sleepwalking through the days, tying knots and yanking the rope loose over and over and over and over. She stays in his house, sleeps on the couch, makes sure he eats. She hides the alcohol in fear that he might drink himself to death and talks to him in low, calm tones when he gets wild-eyed and freezes up.
She doesn’t understand why she’s doing any of this. She doubts it’s a long-dormant maternal side coming through; she barely knows what she’s doing half the time. She acts mostly on instinct, whether she’s talking him down from a psychological crisis or scraping together dinner for them both.
In 7 and 2, she could barely provide for herself. She has let herself fall apart more times than she can admit to herself. And yet here, she’s somehow managing to keep someone else alive.
She figures she owes it to him. After all, if it weren’t for Finnick, she doubts she would have survived her first year as a victor. He laughed at her jokes, made fun of himself, told her which customers liked to draw blood and which ones just liked company. He kept her sane - or as sane as one could possibly be under the circumstances.
She’s just returning the favor.
+
Plutarch Heavensbee asks them confidentially, during the 74th Hunger Games, whether they would be comfortable going back into the arena. Of course, he doesn’t do so in such broad terms - with all the surveillance around, it would be a suicide move to openly refer to a rebellion - but he asks, and they answer, both of them, in the affirmative.
They have nothing to lose. The Capitol has destroyed almost everyone they love, and it’s only to Finnick’s credit that he managed to save Annie. The revolution is coming, and they will be part of it.
Johanna has dreamed about this for years. There’s no way to explain how much she fucking hates Snow and everything about this country. To hell with dissent and civil disobedience; she’s going to burn the whole continent to the ground, and if she burns with it, well, that’s a sacrifice she’s willing to make.
To watch as Katniss Everdeen, some useless teenager, become the face of the rebellion - the one she’s been plotting and dreaming of and is willing to die for - to see Katniss Everdeen slowly but surely become a symbol, something around which the country is beginning to rally, is more than she is prepared to deal with.
She orders another drink as the hovercraft bears down on Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, and she knows right then that her plan to burn Panem to the ground is royally fucked, all thanks to the Girl on Fire.
+
“You never told me,” he says, six months after Annie’s funeral. “What do you do in 2 now? Don’t you have a life?”
Johanna shrugs. “I don’t do much of anything anymore,” she says. “Not a lot of viable skills, you know. I was in between jobs when I heard about the funeral, so I guess I’m still in between jobs.”
“How do you manage? How are you eating?” He furrows his brow. “You’re so thin. You aren’t - using again, are you?”
“No.” She shakes her head and rubs her forearm protectively; this she can be honest about. “No, not since 13. But, you know, I don’t eat much, and I can always find food somewhere. I take care of myself, Finn, you know that.”
“I know,” he says, a knowing smile on his face. This is one of his better days. “You’ve always been admirably self-sufficient.”
She smiles back, in spite of herself. There will always be a part of Johanna Mason that is guarded, terrified of other humans, resistant to unsolicited touch and unsolicited shows of emotion. The part of her who murdered four other teenagers with an axe; who strangled a john with her bare hands; who went to war beside a girl she couldn’t help hating for just stumbling onto all the power that Johanna had ever dreamt of earning. She knows she’ll always be this person, this horribly broken woman who, no matter how hard she tries, will never be normal. She’ll never know what regular people do in conversation and how they make others like them. She’ll never un-see the things she’s seen.
And Finnick is the same. True, he’s not nearly as dark and bitter as she is. He’s at least had some semblance of love in his life. He’s had Annie - beautiful, bright, fragile, the strongest woman they’ve ever known. Annie, who was never really broken, despite everything she faced. She was stronger than both of them combined, and all they can do is try to move past her memory separately.
A year and three days after the funeral, Finnick kisses her on the cliff overlooking the ocean.
“Are you sure?” asks Johanna, pulling away and tracing the scar on his cheek with a fingertip. The crepuscule is coloring him a beautiful golden bronze as he nods solemnly.
“This is what she would want,” he says. “She loved you, Johanna. She used to tell me how strong you were. She was in awe of you.”
Johanna shakes her head. “Bullshit. I don’t - look. I’m just afraid.”
“Of what?”
“What we’ll do to each other. Drink ourselves to death in this little house. There’s too much - there’s just too much at stake here, you know?”
He smiles knowingly. “We’re a matched pair,” he says. “We always have been. Survivors. We’ll always know how to get by.”
When she kisses him this time, he tastes like the sugar cubes in his tea and something bigger, something different. Like promise.
They stay in District 4.
(“No children,” says Johanna, “I mean it. God knows I can’t have them anyway.”
Finnick laughs. “Considering the circumstances, I’m okay with that.”)
Fandom: the hunger games
Pairing: johanna/finnick
Word Count: 3656
Disclaimer: i don't own 'em, suzanne collins does
Summary: happy endings are bullshit; they're two broken people doing the best they can. AKA that AU where finnick lives, annie dies, and johanna is troubled.
After the revolution, things are quiet. The world doesn’t quite return to normal, but it makes its best attempt, and slowly, life becomes livable.
Finnick and Annie return to District 4, nursing their injuries but otherwise safe and sound.
The following year, Annie falls ill. There aren’t many healers in the districts after the war - the Peacekeepers made certain to destroy the lion’s share of them during the rebellion - and there are particularly few in the far-flung reaches of the outer districts. Without real medicine, she can only hold on for so long.
Annie Cresta Odair - victor, rebel, wife - dies with a hacking cough and tears in her eyes as Finnick strokes her hair.
They give her a burial at sea.
And then Finnick falls apart.
Johanna arrives for the funeral that summer, skinny and spindly and out of place among the bronze-skinned, bronze-haired citizens of 4. She stands back at the edge of the crowd during the funeral, staring at the waves, watching the strangers weep for the Cresta girl, the tenuous little thing who survived so much in such a short lifetime.
“She was so strong,” Johanna overhears one woman say to another.
“One of the strongest I ever knew,” her friend whispers back. “It’s too bad, though, she went a little mad at the end…”
Johanna wants to snap back at these strangers. As if you’d know, she wants to yell, you never saw her like I did. You didn’t sit in a cell in the Capitol, listening to her scream as they tortured her naked for information she didn’t have. You were never there when she fell apart. You didn’t go to her wedding and see her at her happiest. You didn’t know her.
One of the strangers turns to her, and Johanna prays they won’t recognize her. Her hair has grown long (well, longer) from sheer negligence, and she’s even thinner than she was the last time they saw her on TV - the morphling will do that to you, turn you into skin and bones. She hides her face the best she can as the stranger asks, “How did you know our Annie?”
Our Annie. As if you’d know. “We were acquaintances,” says Johanna as politely as she can, assuming it’s a better answer than “We were prisoners of war together for a short time.” Satisfied, the women turn away, and Johanna slips away from them, dodging and weaving through the crowd until she’s beside Finnick.
“Hi.”
He turns to her. Looks at her in disbelief. Finally he speaks. “I can’t believe you came.”
She laughs a little. “Why wouldn’t I? I went through hell with Annie. It’s the least I could do to come pay my respects.”
“All the way from 7, though.”
“2, actually.”
“Really?” He seems surprised. “What are you doing there?”
“Nothing important.”
A well-wisher taps him on the arm and he turns away to exchange a few words. When the stranger moves on, he turns back to Johanna. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I just - “
“No, it’s okay,” Johanna says. “I should go, anyway. I just wanted to say hello.”
“No, you don’t have to,” says Finnick. “Come back to the house. We can catch up.” Johanna hesitates, but he presses on. “Please. I haven’t seen you since -“ He doesn’t finish the sentence. Since the war, since he was left for dead. Johanna never went to see him. It wasn’t until the Everdeen Coup, as the history books were bound to call it, that she even knew he was still alive.
“Okay,” she finds herself saying. “I’d like that.”
They return to his house; the same modest little home in the Victors’ Village he’d lived in all those years before. “It’s the place where Annie and I fell in love,” he offers by way of explanation. “It’s a home.”
They sit on the couch and they both have a drink, discussing the weather, politics, anything but Annie and the memories the three of them shared. It’s not that they’re scared to touch the topics, not really, but it troubles them both to discuss the past in its immediacy. In several years, perhaps, but not now, not while every pod explosion and electric shock rings so clearly in their minds.
(Yet Johanna can sense that Finnick is equally reluctant to think about the future. Annie was all he had; his only support system in the world. His parents are long dead, killed by the Capitol after his little secret-reveal on TV. It’s just Finnick now, alone in this house paid for in the blood of children all those years ago.)
They talk idly about the present, then, and they drink.
A few hours later, the doorbell rings and Finnick freezes.
He can’t move. He stands in the kitchen, dumbstruck, blinking and unmoving.
Johanna hurries to the door, opens it. It’s a child, no more than 12 or 13, carrying a basket of bread. “I’m sorry,” she says, as politely as she can. “Finnick isn’t really in a state to receive visitors right now. Can I take a message?”
The child hands him the bread. “From the Gusteaxs,” he says, and she nods. “I’ll tell him you came,” she says, and closes the door.
“Johanna -”
She turns and sees Finnick across the hall, staring daggers into her. “Sorry,” she says, “you weren’t moving -”
“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s just funny. I’ve just never seen you be so nice to a child. Never pegged you for the maternal type.”
She snorts. “That’s because I’m not,” she says, handing him the bread. “I’m never having kids.”
“Well, who would?” he says quietly. “Especially after - ”
“Yeah.” Neither of them finishes the thought.
As Finnick relaxes visibly, Johanna awkwardly heads for the door. “I should probably get going,” she says, “I have a long train ride back to 2. It’s been really, ah.” She pauses. “I’ve really enjoyed seeing you again. And I hate that it’s under these circumstances.”
Finnick shakes his head. “You can stay overnight. The train will be there tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to put you out,” she says, crossing her arms defensively. “You’ve been through so much lately, I don’t -”
“Johanna.” He looks so, so very tired in this light, much older than his 26 years. “Look. When I was young, any time there was a death in the family, everyone would go out of their way to make the survivors feel less alone. You couldn’t have a cousin die without everyone running over with some sort of meal. Not anymore.” He looks around the room, shrinking in plain sight, trapped and scared and alone, and Johanna, suddenly, understands. “You’re the closest thing I have to family now, and that scares me, Johanna. But I really wouldn’t mind it if you stayed.”
She sighs. There is nothing else she can say. She can’t leave him now. And yet to act put-upon would be, well, an act. She came here for a reason. Somehow, after everything they’ve been through, she still cares about Finnick Odair more than she cares about most other humans. “If I’m your only family,” she says wryly, “good fucking luck.”
For the first time in weeks, he laughs. For the first time in years, he laughs at Johanna.
+
The first time they meet, they are both 16 - Finnick very old for his age and Johanna very young; he having won two years before and she, the newly crowned victor, beginning her tour of duty in the Capitol, all tarted up and ready for auction, teetering on her unsteady high heels with a glass of something that an older woman had pressed into her hand with a knowing look.
He gives her an affable smile at the party. “Good luck,” he says.
She shakes it off. She isn’t meant to be here. She isn’t a Career, raised from birth with the intent of making it here, to the Capitol, to be delivered to older men and women who want a night with danger. She refuses to believe that this is real; that she isn’t dreaming in bed at home in 7, terrified but safely asleep.
And she doesn’t need luck from Finnick Odair.
The Capitol doesn’t agree with her. She can handle the rough ones, who want her hands around their throats as they fuck, who want her to hit them and make them scream. She can escape into this, hit them so hard her hands bruise, choke them until their faces turn blue (though with the Capitol makeup trends, this is sometimes more dangerous than one would expect). She kills them over and over again and then lets them walk free, accepting whatever gifts they have to offer - the jewelry goes in a pile, never worn; the money she tucks into her lingerie; the flowers wilting and rotting in their vases, never watered.
It’s the ones who want to talk afterward that get to her. The teenage boys she deflowers, letting them kiss her and pretending it didn’t make her want to vomit. She hears the rumors about the others (the brother and sister who can be bought and sold together; the beautiful Career girls for whom the Gamemakers fix the arena in hopes of being their first), but it seems that nothing could be worse than the gilded, grotesque hell she lives in.
Finnick, as it turns out, isn’t so bad. Their apartments are adjacent, separated by only a single door, and on the worst nights, they pour each other cocktails (the worse the customer, the stronger the liquor) and drink themselves into oblivion, talking about everything and nothing, the way two people do when the curiosity is mutual. The way they do when this curiosity borders on something much more sinister; something like attraction.
Finnick has a girl at home. Her name is Annie Cresta and she is beautiful, fragile, the kind of girl you can’t help wanting to protect. Johanna doesn’t have a boy at home, and this is probably for the better, says Finnick: “At least you don’t have to constantly worry.”
“What could they do to her?” she slurs, four drinks in and nowhere near stopping. These days, she doesn’t quit until she’s out cold; twice this week she’s woken up with a pounding headache and half a bottle of vodka spilling out of her hand onto the silk sheets of her bed.
Finnick shakes his head. “I don’t want to think about it.”
They only sleep together once, and it’s at the behest of a client, a higher-up in the Snow administration who points at both of them, mumbling to the auctioneer, “I want those two, together.”
She gets sloppy drunk beforehand. She doesn’t remember the night. She can only sense that Finnick is painfully sober - he can’t drink before; they won’t give him drugs to help him get it up.
They are seventeen.
Finnick makes a mistake. Finnick steps out of line and angers a client a month before the Reaping.
“Annie Cresta,” says the Capitol escort, and no one volunteers.
Johanna pours herself another drink. She’s a mentor this year for the first time and she’s tasked with teaching her tributes how to kill this girl. Is it better or worse than just letting them die? She honestly couldn’t be fucked either way. There’s so little she cares about now - she just goes on existing, letting her customers do whatever they want to her.
She would give anything for a way out.
+
Annie Cresta is dead. Annie Cresta is dead and Johanna is in District 4, barely awake on Finnick’s couch, awake in the middle of the night, roused by Annie’s screams in her nightmares. She can’t shake the sound of shrieking that rattles in her brain, Annie’s panicked, animalistic yelps mixed with cries for Finnick, her mother, her father, anyone.
In this block of cells at the Capitol, Annie screamed for Finnick and Peeta screamed for Katniss and Johanna had no one to scream for.
In the morning, she lies silently on the couch until Finnick appears from the bedroom. “Hey,” he says. “I’m glad you’re still here.”
She shoots him a look. “What, did you think I’d run off in the middle of the night?”
“I never know with you,” he says. He’s probably telling the truth.
They don’t do much that day. They share the bread from the neighbor boy - Mags’ grandson, Finnick says, with a pained look - and sit outside in the yard, set on a cliff over the ocean, watching the waves roll in on the beach and not speaking. It’s the first time Johanna has ever seen him here at home in 4, but she imagines him to have been markedly different as a child - young and full of life, wielding a trident gleefully like the teenagers jumping around in the water below. She remembers watching his games, remembers the young, handsome boy he was then; nothing like the man who sits beside her, old and defeated in his mid-twenties, a scar running across his cheek and a powerful limp breaking his stride when he walks.
(She knows she’s not the person she was before, either: stick thin with sallow skin and cheekbones that protrude more than ever, track marks from her morphling days still visible on her arms. War is hell, or so goes the old chestnut; they’re just living proof.)
The train bound for District 2 comes and goes. She doesn’t get on. There is so much unfinished business left here.
+
Annie is reaped and Finnick is her mentor. Johanna can tell, even from afar, that this is what one might call “deep shit.”
To her credit, she doesn’t say a word. She keeps to herself during the training period, offering a few words of encouragement to her scrawny little tributes. Useless things. They die in the bloodbath, both of them, and she shrugs it off and pours herself another drink, sitting on the seventh floor alone.
The games run long this year. Everyone is bored. After the initial kills, the remaining half of the tributes simply aren’t entertaining; they spend more time hiding from each other than fighting. A week and a half in, they’re at a party, all the mentors, bored out of their wits, and she watches Finnick strut up to the head Gamemaker, giving him those come-fuck-me eyes and saying words she can’t hear from the distance between them.
The earthquake breaks the dam and Annie treads water until it's all over. She is crowned in front of the nation, her eyes wide, darting around the room like a small animal in a trap.
The Games are a welcome respite from the circuit, but after the finale, the mentors are back on the market.
Johanna has been plotting this for months. She can’t exist in this world anymore. The man asks her, as they always do, to choke him; it’s become something of a gimmick for her. This time she holds on until he slumps, lifeless, to the floor.
(It is worth noting, here, that human beings are the only creatures who strangle. To kill, one must usually let go of their humanity and succumb to the most animal instincts within them; to choke the life out of someone and feel their last breath leave them underneath your bare hands, however - that’s the most base, human thing one can possibly do.)
“I’m sorry,” she says breathlessly, “I didn’t mean to - I couldn’t tell, I honestly thought he would be fine.” They discharge her from the Capitol and send her home to 7; when she arrives, her mother, father, and brothers’ bodies line the floor of the little house in Victor’s Village, blood trickling from the single bulletholes on each of their foreheads.
She sees Finnick once a year after this; and each year at the Tribute Parade, they exchange a few words and that is all.
And then she hears about a revolution.
+
She stays. They lose track of the days; they turn into weeks which fold into months. Finnick is almost catatonic, sleepwalking through the days, tying knots and yanking the rope loose over and over and over and over. She stays in his house, sleeps on the couch, makes sure he eats. She hides the alcohol in fear that he might drink himself to death and talks to him in low, calm tones when he gets wild-eyed and freezes up.
She doesn’t understand why she’s doing any of this. She doubts it’s a long-dormant maternal side coming through; she barely knows what she’s doing half the time. She acts mostly on instinct, whether she’s talking him down from a psychological crisis or scraping together dinner for them both.
In 7 and 2, she could barely provide for herself. She has let herself fall apart more times than she can admit to herself. And yet here, she’s somehow managing to keep someone else alive.
She figures she owes it to him. After all, if it weren’t for Finnick, she doubts she would have survived her first year as a victor. He laughed at her jokes, made fun of himself, told her which customers liked to draw blood and which ones just liked company. He kept her sane - or as sane as one could possibly be under the circumstances.
She’s just returning the favor.
+
Plutarch Heavensbee asks them confidentially, during the 74th Hunger Games, whether they would be comfortable going back into the arena. Of course, he doesn’t do so in such broad terms - with all the surveillance around, it would be a suicide move to openly refer to a rebellion - but he asks, and they answer, both of them, in the affirmative.
They have nothing to lose. The Capitol has destroyed almost everyone they love, and it’s only to Finnick’s credit that he managed to save Annie. The revolution is coming, and they will be part of it.
Johanna has dreamed about this for years. There’s no way to explain how much she fucking hates Snow and everything about this country. To hell with dissent and civil disobedience; she’s going to burn the whole continent to the ground, and if she burns with it, well, that’s a sacrifice she’s willing to make.
To watch as Katniss Everdeen, some useless teenager, become the face of the rebellion - the one she’s been plotting and dreaming of and is willing to die for - to see Katniss Everdeen slowly but surely become a symbol, something around which the country is beginning to rally, is more than she is prepared to deal with.
She orders another drink as the hovercraft bears down on Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, and she knows right then that her plan to burn Panem to the ground is royally fucked, all thanks to the Girl on Fire.
+
“You never told me,” he says, six months after Annie’s funeral. “What do you do in 2 now? Don’t you have a life?”
Johanna shrugs. “I don’t do much of anything anymore,” she says. “Not a lot of viable skills, you know. I was in between jobs when I heard about the funeral, so I guess I’m still in between jobs.”
“How do you manage? How are you eating?” He furrows his brow. “You’re so thin. You aren’t - using again, are you?”
“No.” She shakes her head and rubs her forearm protectively; this she can be honest about. “No, not since 13. But, you know, I don’t eat much, and I can always find food somewhere. I take care of myself, Finn, you know that.”
“I know,” he says, a knowing smile on his face. This is one of his better days. “You’ve always been admirably self-sufficient.”
She smiles back, in spite of herself. There will always be a part of Johanna Mason that is guarded, terrified of other humans, resistant to unsolicited touch and unsolicited shows of emotion. The part of her who murdered four other teenagers with an axe; who strangled a john with her bare hands; who went to war beside a girl she couldn’t help hating for just stumbling onto all the power that Johanna had ever dreamt of earning. She knows she’ll always be this person, this horribly broken woman who, no matter how hard she tries, will never be normal. She’ll never know what regular people do in conversation and how they make others like them. She’ll never un-see the things she’s seen.
And Finnick is the same. True, he’s not nearly as dark and bitter as she is. He’s at least had some semblance of love in his life. He’s had Annie - beautiful, bright, fragile, the strongest woman they’ve ever known. Annie, who was never really broken, despite everything she faced. She was stronger than both of them combined, and all they can do is try to move past her memory separately.
A year and three days after the funeral, Finnick kisses her on the cliff overlooking the ocean.
“Are you sure?” asks Johanna, pulling away and tracing the scar on his cheek with a fingertip. The crepuscule is coloring him a beautiful golden bronze as he nods solemnly.
“This is what she would want,” he says. “She loved you, Johanna. She used to tell me how strong you were. She was in awe of you.”
Johanna shakes her head. “Bullshit. I don’t - look. I’m just afraid.”
“Of what?”
“What we’ll do to each other. Drink ourselves to death in this little house. There’s too much - there’s just too much at stake here, you know?”
He smiles knowingly. “We’re a matched pair,” he says. “We always have been. Survivors. We’ll always know how to get by.”
When she kisses him this time, he tastes like the sugar cubes in his tea and something bigger, something different. Like promise.
They stay in District 4.
(“No children,” says Johanna, “I mean it. God knows I can’t have them anyway.”
Finnick laughs. “Considering the circumstances, I’m okay with that.”)