(no subject)
Title: Reminds Me Of Me
Series: Maysilee Donner: Victor
Author: kath_synecdoche
Characters: Maysilee Donner, Johanna Mason, Finnick Odair, various other tributes (OCs) and victors
Rating: T
Warnings: It's The Hunger Games. So all of that good violent stuff.
Summary: Maysilee sees something in Johanna Mason that nobody else seems to see.
A/N: Beta'd by penelopemuse. Title & inspiration lifted from a lyric in Next to Normal (You remind me of me, and how fucked up I can be).
It was hard for a mentor to talk to one of the other district's tributes, and that was generally perfectly understandable. But the moment Maysilee saw Johanna in the chariot at the Opening Ceremonies, she had a bizarre feeling of kinship for the girl. She was doing her best to smile winningly, but she looked small, innocent, and terrified. She was the kind of girl that everyone expected to be dead in the bloodbath. Maysilee put her out of her mind, determined to focus on her own tributes.
Training brought back her tributes, discussing what they had learned. They were uncertain, and the girl, Char, was especially nervous about the other tributes. But even she seemed scornful about the girl from District Seven, who went through training sobbing, periodically breaking down too much to do a thing.
When the interview came, Johanna was dressed sweet and prettily, but she also looked at least two years younger than she was, a tiny slip of a girl. She smiled prettily and told about how she had promised her family that she would try and win and come home to them. It was sweet, sappy, and even cloying. It wasn’t the kind of answer that would win her any sponsors. It was the kind to give the Games a nice bit of variety in the early stages, and that was all.
Hearing from her tributes about how training was going, and knowing what she did of District Seven, Maysilee noted a sense of disconnect. It was the same way she, the Merchant girl, had virtually no connection to the mines that were the essence of District Twelve. But Johanna was no Merchant girl, she was sure, a score of three notwithstanding. Something, she knew with some clarity, did not quite line up properly if looked at in the right direction, although she seemed to be the only one to see it that way.
So on the last night before the Games began, Maysilee cornered Johanna in the elevator, just the two of them.
The moment the doors shut, she spoke, wasting no time. “There’s something about you. I don’t know if anyone else sees it, because Blight’s not letting on. But you’re going to surprise everyone in these games.”
Johanna looked up sharply, pretences falling away. “What told you that? No one’s supposed to know.”
Maysilee’s lips turned up slightly at the confirmation, and she held Johanna’s gaze. “I was one no one expected to see survive. Merchant girl from District Twelve, a weakling. And then I used what they gave me. And I killed people. And I survived. You remind me of me.”
Johanna held her stare, and then broke it off abruptly as they passed the sixth floor. Staring at the ground, her timid act renewed, she whispered, “You can’t tell anyone. I need what this will give me.”
Maysilee nodded. “May the odds be ever in your favour,” she said, as the door opened to the seventh floor, and Johanna walked out.
* * *
When Johanna Mason turned out to be a violent killing machine with an axe, everyone, apparently including Blight, was surprised. Maysilee looked on with her eyebrows raised, but with her lips in a quirked expression that just wasn’t quite as surprised as everyone else.
It was Finnick who caught her out on it, watching her face as she watched screen 7F more closely than the still lit 12M. He came to stand beside her, flinging his arm around her shoulders with a casualness that ignored the seriousness of every mentoring conversation. “How did you know she would be like this?”
Johanna’s latest victim, number three and her second Career kill, was still displayed on the main screen as Johanna pulled her throwing axe out of the gaping wound in his chest, heart split clean in two. It was gory, but no one in the room was unfamiliar with gore.
Maysilee answered honestly. “I didn’t expect this, with the axe. But I knew she was far more than she made herself out to be. Never underestimate anyone, even the little ones; they can all be far more than they look.”
Finnick paused. “Fair statement, and she’s fully fifteen, hardly the youngest. But she was a very convincing actress through all the prep and interviews. Nothing in a training score of 3 prepares you for this.”
Maysilee shrugged. “The Hunger Games are meant to be unpredictable. It wouldn’t make for terribly good betting if it weren’t.”
“Even so.”
Maysilee declined to reply, and conversation dropped off, but the pair stood together, doing the simple constant arithmetic of whether their tribute was in danger. Maysilee’s eyes flicked between the carnage on the 7F screen, and the 12M screen, where her tribute, Donnie, was tromping through the long grass toward one of three ponds in the arena, and away from where the hovercraft had arrived to pick up Johanna’s last victim. Her eyes went to the large map, where the tributes’ locations and paths were marked, and she stiffened.
Finnick’s reaction was instant, as his tribute was well out of harm’s way for the moment, fed and watered. “What...” his voice trailed off as he did her calculations as well. “Oh.” If they kept going in the same direction, then Johanna would cross Donnie’s inelegantly trodden path through the grass in no more than ten minutes, and she could easily follow him to his death.
Maysilee forced herself to breathe, and lifted up the tablet that held all of her sponsorship details. They were even lower than before, presumably because they’d diverted to Johanna. “There’s nothing I can do,” she said quietly. Even though it was often the case for her, it still hurt every time she was unable to help.
Finnick squeezed her shoulders, in a motion that was meant to be reassuring. “You might not need to do anything. Johanna might not notice the trail.” They were hollow words of comfort. Johanna had picked up her last victim’s trail on less, and Johanna’s path of destruction was hardly going to be stopped by a tribute weak with hunger and thirst and armed only with a knife he barely knew how to use. Both knew it.
Finnick didn’t move or speak beside her, and Maysilee thought distractedly that he was a good kid, whatever the Capitol did to him. It was an easier thought than paying attention to Johanna sighting the trail and following it silently, axes in both hands, ready for another kill.
She diverted from the path once she realised it was going towards the pond, taking a more circuitous route, but allowing herself to move faster and assume a position someway around the pond before Donnie even arrived. She sat hidden in the bushes that were growing near the edge of the pond, waiting.
Donnie arrived at the pond, and reached his hands greedily into the water, spooning gulps of it up with his hands. Maysilee scowled disapproval, but with all the attention in the Capitol on the screen, aware of Johanna’s silent presence, she didn’t even need to check the tablet to know that she didn’t have anywhere near enough sponsorship money to send him a water bottle and iodine to purify the water.
But still, Johanna didn’t move. She was at no risk herself, and murmurs spread amongst watching mentors. What was going on? It was an easy kill, if you had a heart that could stand cold-blooded attacks - and Johanna had already proven she did.
Donnie stumbled away from the pond, back the way he had come, on the same trail, oblivious to the fact that he had just escaped death for the moment.
Finnick was determined to make light of the situation, squeezing her shoulders again gently. “See, he survived.”
Maysilee frowned. “It doesn’t make sense, though.”
Finnick let go and turned to her. “Does it need to?” His voice dropped, and he continued, “Does any of this?”
It was true. But Maysilee wasn’t content with the answer, and then the pieces fell together. Johanna had spared Donnie, the District 12 tribute, her tribute, even though she could have killed him in an instant. She must have recognised him. It was an offering of gratitude to her. A smile twitched on her lips, but she suppressed it.
Finnick, however, noticed. “What is it, Maysilee?”
She just shook her head, and returned to watching screen 12M with a careful eye.
* * *
When Johanna inevitably reached the Victor’s Throne, she was decked out in a gorgeous green gown, low-cut, slender, and carefully designed so that she would look older than her fifteen, the way the interview had made her look younger. She was full of confidence and spunk, the girl they had seen during the Games.
Maysilee watched the interview in the Mentor Hall with the other Victors, a tiny smile on her face. She caught Seeder's eye and the other woman shook her head with a slight smile. “Only you, Maysilee. Everyone else missed it.”
Johanna composed herself perfectly throughout the interview, until Caesar Flickerman asked a final question. “So, we’ve just seen the footage of you from the first interview, and I think I speak for everyone when I say that I saw nothing there to prepare me for the girl sitting on this stage now. Where did you come from?”
Johanna shifted uncomfortably for the first time. “I came up with the strategy myself, the moment Scarlett called my name at the reaping and tears sprung into my eyes. I could have brushed them away, but I decided that I would leave them, because what could it hurt?” She shrugged, pulling herself back to composure. “It progressed from there. I think I confused my family and friends in District Seven, until that first kill.” She paused and smiled. “I didn’t even tell my mentor. Sorry again, Blight, I’m sure you were as confused as everyone else.” She paused again. “Well, almost everyone. There was one Victor who cornered me in an elevator on the last day and told me that I reminded her of her. She gave me just a little bit more confidence that I could win. I can’t possibly thank her enough for that, though I’ve already tried. The only one who saw me coming.” She grinned cheekily into the camera, and Flickerman moved into the closing segments of the interview, thanking her and offering more enthusiastic congratulations.
In the Mentor Hall, everyone had turned to face Maysilee as the speech ran on and her face beamed with appreciation. Blight was the first to say something, exhaustion evident in every fibre of his being. “You knew, and you didn’t say anything?”
Maysilee looked at him, and then glanced away guiltily, nodding. “She asked me not to. I wasn’t supposed to know. I didn’t know if you knew, she didn’t say.”
Finnick was next to speak. “You spoke to her?”
Maysilee nodded, and Finnick leaned back in his chair and pronounced to no one in particular, “It all makes so much more sense now.”
It was Brutus who said what was on the minds of half of the people in the room, and it wasn’t a compliment. “It takes a special one to end up being more of a Mentor to a girl outside of your own District than your real tributes.”
Maysilee blushed scarlet. “It’s not... it wasn’t...” She gathered herself up and went on the defensive. “She did remind me of me. And she did everything herself. I hardly said a thing to her. And my tributes...” She sighed. “One day I’ll have a really decent chance with one of them, but not this time.” It was a sobering thought, but it was one that everyone in the room could understand.
And Mags nodded, followed by Seeder, and everyone’s attention turned to the screen as Caesar Flickerman wished them all a fond farewell until the next Hunger Games.
* * *
It was fully a month after the Games, when there was a phone call on the barely used telephone in the her house. It was unexpected, and as with all calls, Maysilee was left to be the one to answer it.
“Hello, Maysilee speaking?”
The response was timid. “I... I really wanted to say thank you for believing in me, but this... how do you live with it?” It was Johanna. “The things you’ve done. The nightmares.”
Maysilee smiled sadly. “Everyone finds a way. Some find it at the bottom of a bottle, or a needle, but I don’t recommend that. Some find it in another person’s arms, but that has its own challenges. I find it by spending each and every day trying to make enough life to make up for all of the death I’ve caused. It’s more crushing than it has any right to be.” She paused. “It’s not easy, but you’ll find a way, Johanna. I believed in you in the arena, and I believe in you now. You’re strong enough.”
There was a long pause. “I’ll see you on the Victory Tour,” Johanna said, and hung up.
And for the first time in over ten years, Maysilee curled up and cried at what the Hunger Games did.
Series: Maysilee Donner: Victor
Author: kath_synecdoche
Characters: Maysilee Donner, Johanna Mason, Finnick Odair, various other tributes (OCs) and victors
Rating: T
Warnings: It's The Hunger Games. So all of that good violent stuff.
Summary: Maysilee sees something in Johanna Mason that nobody else seems to see.
A/N: Beta'd by penelopemuse. Title & inspiration lifted from a lyric in Next to Normal (You remind me of me, and how fucked up I can be).
It was hard for a mentor to talk to one of the other district's tributes, and that was generally perfectly understandable. But the moment Maysilee saw Johanna in the chariot at the Opening Ceremonies, she had a bizarre feeling of kinship for the girl. She was doing her best to smile winningly, but she looked small, innocent, and terrified. She was the kind of girl that everyone expected to be dead in the bloodbath. Maysilee put her out of her mind, determined to focus on her own tributes.
Training brought back her tributes, discussing what they had learned. They were uncertain, and the girl, Char, was especially nervous about the other tributes. But even she seemed scornful about the girl from District Seven, who went through training sobbing, periodically breaking down too much to do a thing.
When the interview came, Johanna was dressed sweet and prettily, but she also looked at least two years younger than she was, a tiny slip of a girl. She smiled prettily and told about how she had promised her family that she would try and win and come home to them. It was sweet, sappy, and even cloying. It wasn’t the kind of answer that would win her any sponsors. It was the kind to give the Games a nice bit of variety in the early stages, and that was all.
Hearing from her tributes about how training was going, and knowing what she did of District Seven, Maysilee noted a sense of disconnect. It was the same way she, the Merchant girl, had virtually no connection to the mines that were the essence of District Twelve. But Johanna was no Merchant girl, she was sure, a score of three notwithstanding. Something, she knew with some clarity, did not quite line up properly if looked at in the right direction, although she seemed to be the only one to see it that way.
So on the last night before the Games began, Maysilee cornered Johanna in the elevator, just the two of them.
The moment the doors shut, she spoke, wasting no time. “There’s something about you. I don’t know if anyone else sees it, because Blight’s not letting on. But you’re going to surprise everyone in these games.”
Johanna looked up sharply, pretences falling away. “What told you that? No one’s supposed to know.”
Maysilee’s lips turned up slightly at the confirmation, and she held Johanna’s gaze. “I was one no one expected to see survive. Merchant girl from District Twelve, a weakling. And then I used what they gave me. And I killed people. And I survived. You remind me of me.”
Johanna held her stare, and then broke it off abruptly as they passed the sixth floor. Staring at the ground, her timid act renewed, she whispered, “You can’t tell anyone. I need what this will give me.”
Maysilee nodded. “May the odds be ever in your favour,” she said, as the door opened to the seventh floor, and Johanna walked out.
* * *
When Johanna Mason turned out to be a violent killing machine with an axe, everyone, apparently including Blight, was surprised. Maysilee looked on with her eyebrows raised, but with her lips in a quirked expression that just wasn’t quite as surprised as everyone else.
It was Finnick who caught her out on it, watching her face as she watched screen 7F more closely than the still lit 12M. He came to stand beside her, flinging his arm around her shoulders with a casualness that ignored the seriousness of every mentoring conversation. “How did you know she would be like this?”
Johanna’s latest victim, number three and her second Career kill, was still displayed on the main screen as Johanna pulled her throwing axe out of the gaping wound in his chest, heart split clean in two. It was gory, but no one in the room was unfamiliar with gore.
Maysilee answered honestly. “I didn’t expect this, with the axe. But I knew she was far more than she made herself out to be. Never underestimate anyone, even the little ones; they can all be far more than they look.”
Finnick paused. “Fair statement, and she’s fully fifteen, hardly the youngest. But she was a very convincing actress through all the prep and interviews. Nothing in a training score of 3 prepares you for this.”
Maysilee shrugged. “The Hunger Games are meant to be unpredictable. It wouldn’t make for terribly good betting if it weren’t.”
“Even so.”
Maysilee declined to reply, and conversation dropped off, but the pair stood together, doing the simple constant arithmetic of whether their tribute was in danger. Maysilee’s eyes flicked between the carnage on the 7F screen, and the 12M screen, where her tribute, Donnie, was tromping through the long grass toward one of three ponds in the arena, and away from where the hovercraft had arrived to pick up Johanna’s last victim. Her eyes went to the large map, where the tributes’ locations and paths were marked, and she stiffened.
Finnick’s reaction was instant, as his tribute was well out of harm’s way for the moment, fed and watered. “What...” his voice trailed off as he did her calculations as well. “Oh.” If they kept going in the same direction, then Johanna would cross Donnie’s inelegantly trodden path through the grass in no more than ten minutes, and she could easily follow him to his death.
Maysilee forced herself to breathe, and lifted up the tablet that held all of her sponsorship details. They were even lower than before, presumably because they’d diverted to Johanna. “There’s nothing I can do,” she said quietly. Even though it was often the case for her, it still hurt every time she was unable to help.
Finnick squeezed her shoulders, in a motion that was meant to be reassuring. “You might not need to do anything. Johanna might not notice the trail.” They were hollow words of comfort. Johanna had picked up her last victim’s trail on less, and Johanna’s path of destruction was hardly going to be stopped by a tribute weak with hunger and thirst and armed only with a knife he barely knew how to use. Both knew it.
Finnick didn’t move or speak beside her, and Maysilee thought distractedly that he was a good kid, whatever the Capitol did to him. It was an easier thought than paying attention to Johanna sighting the trail and following it silently, axes in both hands, ready for another kill.
She diverted from the path once she realised it was going towards the pond, taking a more circuitous route, but allowing herself to move faster and assume a position someway around the pond before Donnie even arrived. She sat hidden in the bushes that were growing near the edge of the pond, waiting.
Donnie arrived at the pond, and reached his hands greedily into the water, spooning gulps of it up with his hands. Maysilee scowled disapproval, but with all the attention in the Capitol on the screen, aware of Johanna’s silent presence, she didn’t even need to check the tablet to know that she didn’t have anywhere near enough sponsorship money to send him a water bottle and iodine to purify the water.
But still, Johanna didn’t move. She was at no risk herself, and murmurs spread amongst watching mentors. What was going on? It was an easy kill, if you had a heart that could stand cold-blooded attacks - and Johanna had already proven she did.
Donnie stumbled away from the pond, back the way he had come, on the same trail, oblivious to the fact that he had just escaped death for the moment.
Finnick was determined to make light of the situation, squeezing her shoulders again gently. “See, he survived.”
Maysilee frowned. “It doesn’t make sense, though.”
Finnick let go and turned to her. “Does it need to?” His voice dropped, and he continued, “Does any of this?”
It was true. But Maysilee wasn’t content with the answer, and then the pieces fell together. Johanna had spared Donnie, the District 12 tribute, her tribute, even though she could have killed him in an instant. She must have recognised him. It was an offering of gratitude to her. A smile twitched on her lips, but she suppressed it.
Finnick, however, noticed. “What is it, Maysilee?”
She just shook her head, and returned to watching screen 12M with a careful eye.
* * *
When Johanna inevitably reached the Victor’s Throne, she was decked out in a gorgeous green gown, low-cut, slender, and carefully designed so that she would look older than her fifteen, the way the interview had made her look younger. She was full of confidence and spunk, the girl they had seen during the Games.
Maysilee watched the interview in the Mentor Hall with the other Victors, a tiny smile on her face. She caught Seeder's eye and the other woman shook her head with a slight smile. “Only you, Maysilee. Everyone else missed it.”
Johanna composed herself perfectly throughout the interview, until Caesar Flickerman asked a final question. “So, we’ve just seen the footage of you from the first interview, and I think I speak for everyone when I say that I saw nothing there to prepare me for the girl sitting on this stage now. Where did you come from?”
Johanna shifted uncomfortably for the first time. “I came up with the strategy myself, the moment Scarlett called my name at the reaping and tears sprung into my eyes. I could have brushed them away, but I decided that I would leave them, because what could it hurt?” She shrugged, pulling herself back to composure. “It progressed from there. I think I confused my family and friends in District Seven, until that first kill.” She paused and smiled. “I didn’t even tell my mentor. Sorry again, Blight, I’m sure you were as confused as everyone else.” She paused again. “Well, almost everyone. There was one Victor who cornered me in an elevator on the last day and told me that I reminded her of her. She gave me just a little bit more confidence that I could win. I can’t possibly thank her enough for that, though I’ve already tried. The only one who saw me coming.” She grinned cheekily into the camera, and Flickerman moved into the closing segments of the interview, thanking her and offering more enthusiastic congratulations.
In the Mentor Hall, everyone had turned to face Maysilee as the speech ran on and her face beamed with appreciation. Blight was the first to say something, exhaustion evident in every fibre of his being. “You knew, and you didn’t say anything?”
Maysilee looked at him, and then glanced away guiltily, nodding. “She asked me not to. I wasn’t supposed to know. I didn’t know if you knew, she didn’t say.”
Finnick was next to speak. “You spoke to her?”
Maysilee nodded, and Finnick leaned back in his chair and pronounced to no one in particular, “It all makes so much more sense now.”
It was Brutus who said what was on the minds of half of the people in the room, and it wasn’t a compliment. “It takes a special one to end up being more of a Mentor to a girl outside of your own District than your real tributes.”
Maysilee blushed scarlet. “It’s not... it wasn’t...” She gathered herself up and went on the defensive. “She did remind me of me. And she did everything herself. I hardly said a thing to her. And my tributes...” She sighed. “One day I’ll have a really decent chance with one of them, but not this time.” It was a sobering thought, but it was one that everyone in the room could understand.
And Mags nodded, followed by Seeder, and everyone’s attention turned to the screen as Caesar Flickerman wished them all a fond farewell until the next Hunger Games.
* * *
It was fully a month after the Games, when there was a phone call on the barely used telephone in the her house. It was unexpected, and as with all calls, Maysilee was left to be the one to answer it.
“Hello, Maysilee speaking?”
The response was timid. “I... I really wanted to say thank you for believing in me, but this... how do you live with it?” It was Johanna. “The things you’ve done. The nightmares.”
Maysilee smiled sadly. “Everyone finds a way. Some find it at the bottom of a bottle, or a needle, but I don’t recommend that. Some find it in another person’s arms, but that has its own challenges. I find it by spending each and every day trying to make enough life to make up for all of the death I’ve caused. It’s more crushing than it has any right to be.” She paused. “It’s not easy, but you’ll find a way, Johanna. I believed in you in the arena, and I believe in you now. You’re strong enough.”
There was a long pause. “I’ll see you on the Victory Tour,” Johanna said, and hung up.
And for the first time in over ten years, Maysilee curled up and cried at what the Hunger Games did.