Beyond The Woods | The Hunger Games | Johanna-centric
t: Beyond The Woods
f: The Hunger Games
c: Johanna
ch: fic_corner (& fc_smorgasbord - 4. ingratitude)
r/wc: PG/1785
s: No one had thought all that much of Seven before a young woman ripped off her sheep’s demeanour and revealed the wolf’s teeth beneath.
n: Written for PorcupineGirl for the fic_corner exchange. My prompt was I'd love something that shows the world of Panem and The Hunger Games from the perspective of someone other than Katniss, and I thought Johanna would be an interesting one to write/read? Obvs a bit dark and horrible, because, Hunger Games, but not too awful.
District Seven got the trees.
Johanna hadn’t ever seen a horizon before the guards pushed her onto the train, gritting her teeth against other people’s tears. Her escort chattered brightly, all decked out in Capitol shimmer, and there she was, imminent death at seventeen with the world suddenly too big for her, rolling out flat and empty and with so much sky. That was worse, maybe, than the blow of her name spilling out at the Reaping, the goodbyes she didn’t want to say, more angry than upset, more furious than scared. But leaving the trees behind, the branches that dappled the light from as far back as she could remember; that part dragged at something in her lungs, something in her eyes.
(Finnick says it was the same for him, being wrenched away from the sea. His constant companion, always within sight, stretching as far as he could see and beyond that. They don’t have bodies of water in the Capitol, or real trees that haven’t been twisted into something gaudy and wrong: everything’s artificial, enough to turn your stomach if you’d let it.)
Seven had three Victors at the time, a poor number in comparison to the Career Tribute districts, but better than some -Twelve had only the one, who rolled onto the stage for the Reapings year after year, while bets changed hands over whether he’d throw up on screen this year. It was Blight who came to find Johanna, kneeling in front of a window with her palms pressed to the glass and the flat, flat landscape skidding by her fingertips. His lips narrowed and she could see him thinking that she wasn’t going to be much use; another girl with her ribs cracked open at the cornucopia.
I can use that, she thought, and let him order her in to dinner.
-
Her home, her prize, is a large empty house that has furniture she didn’t pick out and cupboards full of food she doesn’t want to eat. There’s no trace of anyone else in the building; in fact, if she left tomorrow, there’d be no sign anyone lived here at all.
Half a dozen ugly dresses in the closet and a telephone that never rings. That’s what Johanna’s worth amounts to in her own district. Well. All that and an axe that she keeps beneath her mattress, the blade eternally sharp, the handle smooth and familiar in her hand. A little secret, and a last resort. There’s nothing anyone can do to her anymore, of course, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to stop them from trying.
Life is dull, in the same way that life was dull before, but worse, now, because she actually liked her work, liked climbing trees until her knees and elbows were scraped raw, liked the feeling of a branch or a trunk giving way beneath the head of her axe, blows hard enough to judder up the length of her arms and through her shoulders.
(Some nights, though perhaps not as many as there should be, she remembers that human skulls caved that way too.)
If she had friends before the Games, she doesn’t now. Johanna’s always kept herself to herself, impatient and bored, and when she got to go back home her parents cried and the people gathered to cheer her name, extra food for everyone, and no one had thought all that much of Seven before a young woman ripped off her sheep’s demeanour and revealed the wolf’s teeth beneath. There’s no going back once you’ve done that, though. Even if she’d wanted to, Johanna could never have put her innocent eyes back, a smile that didn’t seem sly and sharp. People claimed they were glad she wasn’t dead, that Seven had a Victor once more, but none of them wanted to spend too long around her after that.
And then she wouldn’t play by the rules, because they’d been promised that if they won there would be no rules - and that was the only naïve part of her, the part that believed that - and the next thing she knew, Johanna had no family anymore. It would have been cruel, she thinks sometimes, to leave her with scraps of mementoes of them: jewellery, clothes, pictures. Something she could hang onto and weep over. But President Snow has always known what he’s doing, and this is worse. Having nothing makes her feel crazy half the time; like maybe her family never existed at all.
-
The Capitol never changes, in that it is ever-changing, and it never gets any better.
The citizens, obsessed with their Victors, like they’ll ever own a piece of Johanna, remain starstruck and delighted when she passes by. Johanna remains a beast like the ones in their menagerie: they like the idea that she could bite them at any moment, but they also like the certainty that she never will. She can’t.
They pack them into their boxes. Johanna is the fierce, slippery one, and Finnick is the charming one who’ll lie in your bed for an affordable price, don’t you know. Enobaria is a warrior queen and Beetee is the crazed genius for pitying at a distance when he returns to the Capitol for parties and Games.
If Johanna has to dress in something decorated with fucking trees for one more special occasion she has no interest in, just so a politician with hot sticky hands can paw at her hips while Finnick grins resignedly and flutters his eyelashes and everyone pretends that Haymitch Abernathy was never invited in the first place… well, maybe she’ll do something irresponsible that they can’t kill her family for because they’ve already done that.
The fashions seem to alter every time she marches obediently back, because it’s not worse here than it is at home, where the trees don’t whisper her name anymore and nobody meets her eye; at least here she knows that everything is a lie, and tomorrow will be horribly similar to today. Her stylists - always bitter that they’re stuck trying to cover up the scarring on a Victor and not getting to create a parade outfit for a fresh new Tribute - want her to keep up, implant real claws to “show off your ruthless nature”, have her teeth filed into something that could rip throats. Johanna refuses. She may be a puppet, publicly and nakedly so, but her body is the last thing that’s halfway hers, and she isn’t going to give them any more than they take anyway.
(The year she won, it became fashionable for the citizens to wear jewellery decorated with miniature axes made of silver, tree branches in their hair, and to carry bags made of lightweight, flexible wood. When her Victory Tour was over, Johanna sat in her new ugly house and watched them carrying trees onto trains to be taken straight to the Capitol for fashion purposes, and bit at her silver-painted nails, and reflected that she hadn’t planned for this.)
-
Her favourite drinking game, generally when her Tributes are sleeping in the days before they’ll fall in their own blood no matter what she tells them, is What I Would Have Done If I Hadn’t Been A Tribute.
It should’ve gotten stale by now, but it’s the bruise they can’t stop poking, the loose tooth they won’t leave alone.
“My life would be exactly the same,” Finnick lies prettily, lounging back in his chair with a glass of something that looks like liquid silver and messes with your head quickly. “Crowds cheering my name, beautiful women…”
He doesn’t mention Annie Cresta and nobody brings her up. Annie is one of those untouchable things, in a life where everything you have has already been screwed up and flung away, not for you anymore. Sometimes, in her more bitter moments - “aren’t those all of your moments?” Haymitch asked her once, something nearly funny coming from him - Johanna reflects that she should’ve gone Annie’s way. The Capitol peel away from madness like it’s catching, and prefer to leave Annie to “rest” in Four than drag her around for uncomfortable parades. She can get away with it, because she can’t obey; if Johanna just plain won’t, well, watch them destroy her world.
“You’d have drowned showing off in a fishing boat accident,” Haymitch remarks, dry, and he’s drinking sour ugly whisky that no one but him would want to drink. Another punishment he lays on himself. That’s what they tell you, you know, once you’ve won, if you don’t step up to the line quick enough. You see Haymitch Abernathy? Do you want to be like him?
Johanna should’ve heeded their warnings.
“What about you, old man?” Finnick teases, sipping the silvery alcohol that makes his lips shine like the moon.
“Dead in a mine,” Haymitch says cheerfully, raising his glass for an impromptu toast.
Being a Victor generally means you live longer, as long as you don’t mind a half-existence where it turns out that starving to death in a shitty backwater district might’ve been preferable after all. It’s one of those things that you don’t find out until it’s too late to go back.
“What about you?” Finnick asks, tipping his head to Johanna, who is drinking the happy medium of drinks between Haymitch’s bitter penitence and Finnick’s Capitol concoction. It doesn’t exactly taste good, but after four of them, it doesn’t matter anymore.
She sent her Tributes off to sleep with a shrug; they’ll be tested tomorrow, and she has no good lies to tell them. Axes are in their blood in Seven, but there’s a difference between wood and flesh, whatever you tell yourself. Another year, another pair of lives on her hands. It’s the Capitol’s fault, of course, but they won’t be the ones taking what remains of the bodies home.
“Dead in a lumbar accident,” Johanna tells Finnick at last, the words slipping easily from her mouth. It happens more often than it should do, workers killed by falling trees, logs breaking free from their vans to crush people. Sometimes, they’re even genuine accidents.
“Nah.” Haymitch laughs a cracked laugh, leans back in his chair. “You’re a survivor, Jo. Whatever you do, you survive.”
It’s not the first time Johanna’s been told this; it won’t be the last, either.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Finnick remarks. He’s flotsam, drifting along where the Capitol have pushed him, choices a thing of the past. These people, brought up by the sea; they know how to stay afloat, whatever the cost.
Johanna tips her head to one side. “Well,” she allows, “there are worse things to be.”
One of these days, she might even believe it.
-
f: The Hunger Games
c: Johanna
ch: fic_corner (& fc_smorgasbord - 4. ingratitude)
r/wc: PG/1785
s: No one had thought all that much of Seven before a young woman ripped off her sheep’s demeanour and revealed the wolf’s teeth beneath.
n: Written for PorcupineGirl for the fic_corner exchange. My prompt was I'd love something that shows the world of Panem and The Hunger Games from the perspective of someone other than Katniss, and I thought Johanna would be an interesting one to write/read? Obvs a bit dark and horrible, because, Hunger Games, but not too awful.
District Seven got the trees.
Johanna hadn’t ever seen a horizon before the guards pushed her onto the train, gritting her teeth against other people’s tears. Her escort chattered brightly, all decked out in Capitol shimmer, and there she was, imminent death at seventeen with the world suddenly too big for her, rolling out flat and empty and with so much sky. That was worse, maybe, than the blow of her name spilling out at the Reaping, the goodbyes she didn’t want to say, more angry than upset, more furious than scared. But leaving the trees behind, the branches that dappled the light from as far back as she could remember; that part dragged at something in her lungs, something in her eyes.
(Finnick says it was the same for him, being wrenched away from the sea. His constant companion, always within sight, stretching as far as he could see and beyond that. They don’t have bodies of water in the Capitol, or real trees that haven’t been twisted into something gaudy and wrong: everything’s artificial, enough to turn your stomach if you’d let it.)
Seven had three Victors at the time, a poor number in comparison to the Career Tribute districts, but better than some -Twelve had only the one, who rolled onto the stage for the Reapings year after year, while bets changed hands over whether he’d throw up on screen this year. It was Blight who came to find Johanna, kneeling in front of a window with her palms pressed to the glass and the flat, flat landscape skidding by her fingertips. His lips narrowed and she could see him thinking that she wasn’t going to be much use; another girl with her ribs cracked open at the cornucopia.
I can use that, she thought, and let him order her in to dinner.
-
Her home, her prize, is a large empty house that has furniture she didn’t pick out and cupboards full of food she doesn’t want to eat. There’s no trace of anyone else in the building; in fact, if she left tomorrow, there’d be no sign anyone lived here at all.
Half a dozen ugly dresses in the closet and a telephone that never rings. That’s what Johanna’s worth amounts to in her own district. Well. All that and an axe that she keeps beneath her mattress, the blade eternally sharp, the handle smooth and familiar in her hand. A little secret, and a last resort. There’s nothing anyone can do to her anymore, of course, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to stop them from trying.
Life is dull, in the same way that life was dull before, but worse, now, because she actually liked her work, liked climbing trees until her knees and elbows were scraped raw, liked the feeling of a branch or a trunk giving way beneath the head of her axe, blows hard enough to judder up the length of her arms and through her shoulders.
(Some nights, though perhaps not as many as there should be, she remembers that human skulls caved that way too.)
If she had friends before the Games, she doesn’t now. Johanna’s always kept herself to herself, impatient and bored, and when she got to go back home her parents cried and the people gathered to cheer her name, extra food for everyone, and no one had thought all that much of Seven before a young woman ripped off her sheep’s demeanour and revealed the wolf’s teeth beneath. There’s no going back once you’ve done that, though. Even if she’d wanted to, Johanna could never have put her innocent eyes back, a smile that didn’t seem sly and sharp. People claimed they were glad she wasn’t dead, that Seven had a Victor once more, but none of them wanted to spend too long around her after that.
And then she wouldn’t play by the rules, because they’d been promised that if they won there would be no rules - and that was the only naïve part of her, the part that believed that - and the next thing she knew, Johanna had no family anymore. It would have been cruel, she thinks sometimes, to leave her with scraps of mementoes of them: jewellery, clothes, pictures. Something she could hang onto and weep over. But President Snow has always known what he’s doing, and this is worse. Having nothing makes her feel crazy half the time; like maybe her family never existed at all.
-
The Capitol never changes, in that it is ever-changing, and it never gets any better.
The citizens, obsessed with their Victors, like they’ll ever own a piece of Johanna, remain starstruck and delighted when she passes by. Johanna remains a beast like the ones in their menagerie: they like the idea that she could bite them at any moment, but they also like the certainty that she never will. She can’t.
They pack them into their boxes. Johanna is the fierce, slippery one, and Finnick is the charming one who’ll lie in your bed for an affordable price, don’t you know. Enobaria is a warrior queen and Beetee is the crazed genius for pitying at a distance when he returns to the Capitol for parties and Games.
If Johanna has to dress in something decorated with fucking trees for one more special occasion she has no interest in, just so a politician with hot sticky hands can paw at her hips while Finnick grins resignedly and flutters his eyelashes and everyone pretends that Haymitch Abernathy was never invited in the first place… well, maybe she’ll do something irresponsible that they can’t kill her family for because they’ve already done that.
The fashions seem to alter every time she marches obediently back, because it’s not worse here than it is at home, where the trees don’t whisper her name anymore and nobody meets her eye; at least here she knows that everything is a lie, and tomorrow will be horribly similar to today. Her stylists - always bitter that they’re stuck trying to cover up the scarring on a Victor and not getting to create a parade outfit for a fresh new Tribute - want her to keep up, implant real claws to “show off your ruthless nature”, have her teeth filed into something that could rip throats. Johanna refuses. She may be a puppet, publicly and nakedly so, but her body is the last thing that’s halfway hers, and she isn’t going to give them any more than they take anyway.
(The year she won, it became fashionable for the citizens to wear jewellery decorated with miniature axes made of silver, tree branches in their hair, and to carry bags made of lightweight, flexible wood. When her Victory Tour was over, Johanna sat in her new ugly house and watched them carrying trees onto trains to be taken straight to the Capitol for fashion purposes, and bit at her silver-painted nails, and reflected that she hadn’t planned for this.)
-
Her favourite drinking game, generally when her Tributes are sleeping in the days before they’ll fall in their own blood no matter what she tells them, is What I Would Have Done If I Hadn’t Been A Tribute.
It should’ve gotten stale by now, but it’s the bruise they can’t stop poking, the loose tooth they won’t leave alone.
“My life would be exactly the same,” Finnick lies prettily, lounging back in his chair with a glass of something that looks like liquid silver and messes with your head quickly. “Crowds cheering my name, beautiful women…”
He doesn’t mention Annie Cresta and nobody brings her up. Annie is one of those untouchable things, in a life where everything you have has already been screwed up and flung away, not for you anymore. Sometimes, in her more bitter moments - “aren’t those all of your moments?” Haymitch asked her once, something nearly funny coming from him - Johanna reflects that she should’ve gone Annie’s way. The Capitol peel away from madness like it’s catching, and prefer to leave Annie to “rest” in Four than drag her around for uncomfortable parades. She can get away with it, because she can’t obey; if Johanna just plain won’t, well, watch them destroy her world.
“You’d have drowned showing off in a fishing boat accident,” Haymitch remarks, dry, and he’s drinking sour ugly whisky that no one but him would want to drink. Another punishment he lays on himself. That’s what they tell you, you know, once you’ve won, if you don’t step up to the line quick enough. You see Haymitch Abernathy? Do you want to be like him?
Johanna should’ve heeded their warnings.
“What about you, old man?” Finnick teases, sipping the silvery alcohol that makes his lips shine like the moon.
“Dead in a mine,” Haymitch says cheerfully, raising his glass for an impromptu toast.
Being a Victor generally means you live longer, as long as you don’t mind a half-existence where it turns out that starving to death in a shitty backwater district might’ve been preferable after all. It’s one of those things that you don’t find out until it’s too late to go back.
“What about you?” Finnick asks, tipping his head to Johanna, who is drinking the happy medium of drinks between Haymitch’s bitter penitence and Finnick’s Capitol concoction. It doesn’t exactly taste good, but after four of them, it doesn’t matter anymore.
She sent her Tributes off to sleep with a shrug; they’ll be tested tomorrow, and she has no good lies to tell them. Axes are in their blood in Seven, but there’s a difference between wood and flesh, whatever you tell yourself. Another year, another pair of lives on her hands. It’s the Capitol’s fault, of course, but they won’t be the ones taking what remains of the bodies home.
“Dead in a lumbar accident,” Johanna tells Finnick at last, the words slipping easily from her mouth. It happens more often than it should do, workers killed by falling trees, logs breaking free from their vans to crush people. Sometimes, they’re even genuine accidents.
“Nah.” Haymitch laughs a cracked laugh, leans back in his chair. “You’re a survivor, Jo. Whatever you do, you survive.”
It’s not the first time Johanna’s been told this; it won’t be the last, either.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Finnick remarks. He’s flotsam, drifting along where the Capitol have pushed him, choices a thing of the past. These people, brought up by the sea; they know how to stay afloat, whatever the cost.
Johanna tips her head to one side. “Well,” she allows, “there are worse things to be.”
One of these days, she might even believe it.
-