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"Play dead," Enobaria hisses to Johanna, when she passes Johanna coming into the interrogation room. She widens her eyes, expressing the importance that Johanna do what she says. Johanna expects some sort of feeling of pushback, disdain from taking orders from Enobaria of all people. But nothing comes. She is a different person now, after however long she's been down here. If Enobaria tells her to jump, she asks how high.
She knows the drill - the guards are here to hurt Enobaria. They'll torture her or rape her so that Johanna will answer questions to make it stop. But they'll warm up with Johanna. They'll get her nice and sensitive, tears on her cheeks and snot coming out of her nose first, with the electric shocks they like so much.
She stiffens as they attach the electrodes, bile rising in her throat in anticipation of what's to follow. It's pain, certainly, it's pain, but it's also worse. It's her brain going completely blank and her mouth tasting like static and her heart beating out of rhythm, and the horrible sensation that she just needs to get away, by any means, but she is chained to the table.
And all the while, Enobaria stares at her, imploring her to play dead. Johanna's heart beats with the anticipation of something, anything changing, and so she misses it when the guard comes from behind and drops the soaking wet towel over her head. She instinctively inhales, something she's learned not to do if she isn't surprised by them, and water obstructs her breathing, plugging her mouth and nose. It goes on for too long, until she thinks she might actually die, and then the towel is removed, and the shocks start right away.
Somehow, impossibly, she remembers Enobaria's request, and she lets her body go limp, her legs making no attempt to hold her in the chair. Letting go is nice, actually, and even when she bites her tongue, it's no worse than everything else. She feels her heart beating wrong, somehow, and wonders if she really is dying, and she lets her eyes slip shut, lets the bile sitting in her throat slip out of her mouth, and when the current is finally turned off, she doesn't allow herself to breathe.
It hurts. It hurts so fucking badly, but she hurts every minute of every day since the Games, so what does it matter? Enobaria asked for this, and so she does it, because Enobaria is being tortured to make Johanna talk, so she owes her this and more.
"How much did you use?" Mustache asks. Johanna knows them all just by their voices.
"Same as usual." That was Baldy.
"Well, she's lost weight. Wait… she's not actually… dead… is she?" This was the third guard, usually responsible for Enobaria, Blondie.
"If she is, it's not my fault." Baldy comes up close to her, and she worries he's going to hear her still-beating heart, but there's a cry from behind her. She risks a peek, and sees that Enobaria has stabbed Blondie in the neck with some sort of shiv. Enobaria then takes his gun from his holster and fires two rounds in quick succession, one at each of the remaining guards. Then a final round to finish off the blonde guard.
"Fuck," Johanna says, sitting upright. It's difficult, her neck is stiff and her muscles won't work right so soon after the electrocution. And she had bit her tongue, so there's too much blood in her mouth, mixing with the bile, disgusting and forcing its way out, before she can speak again.
Enobaria puts one of the remaining guards' pistols on the table, keeps the third in hand, and tucks the first, the one she's already shot with, in her waistband. Enobaria fumbles around with something on Mustache's belt, and she comes up with the keys to the cuffs keeping Johanna chained to the table. She unlocks her, and for the first time in days? weeks? months? Johanna is relatively free.
"Stay here," Enobaria says, as if Johanna could go anywhere. She isn't even sure if she can stand, let alone walk anywhere. There's blood dripping from her chin all down her front now, so she just nods. "Shoot anyone who comes through this door. I'll knock four times before I come back, so you know not to shoot me."
Johanna nods again, and hands trembling, picks up the pistol on the table. She's never handled a gun, let alone shot one, and she's certain she would fail at it, from the recoil alone. But perhaps, with a miracle, she could kill someone if her life depended on it. That's how it had worked in her first Hunger Games, after all. No one had expected her to win - no one had expected her to get the upper hand on a much larger tribute from District 1, but she wanted to live, so she did what was necessary.
Enobaria pushes Johanna's chair around so it's facing the door, and then Enobaria is gone, and she is alone in the interrogation room. There's a long silence, and then shouting, a thud against the door, and gunshots, too many at once. Johanna holds her breath again, gun pointed at the door, ready to shoot at anyone who dared barge in, but no one comes.
Killing the first three is relatively easy. Enobaria tells herself that if she can do that, she can do the rest, but truly she isn't so sure. She doesn't know what kind of systems they have, if they will call for reinforcements. It is possible that they can call in infinitely more guards, and she will be sealing her own fate. But it's a gamble she has to take, because she cannot bear to live like this any longer - being raped for amusement or to make Johanna talk, watching them come closer and closer to killing Johanna in interrogation, listening to Peeta howl as his mind goes, and losing her patience with Annie's ceaseless crying, tapping, stomping, questions.
She leaves the interrogation room with two guns, and at first, the guards in the booth at the far end of the hall don't notice her. This is good; she has the element of surprise. She looks between Annie and Peeta, but truthfully, she's already made her decision. If she is going to give one of them a gun, is has to be Annie. Annie's arms are long and thin, she doesn't seem like the type to ever have handled a gun before, but she also seems like the type who wouldn't have won her Games.
"Three shots left," she says, clicking off the safety and sliding the gun through the bars to Annie. "Aim for their chests."
Annie widens her eyes, as if horrified by the thought of killing these men, but didn't they come for Annie's body also? She nods, picking up the gun and staring at it as she holds it lengthwise. For one terrible second, Enobaria thinks Annie is going to shoot her own brains out, and then she holds the gun steadily in her hands.
Enobaria goes to the booth and knocks on the door. She hides off to the side, so the guard will have to open it to see who's knocked. There are two guards with crew cuts left alive, and one with a bald spot. One steps out, and she doesn't even check to see which one it is before she shoots him in the chest.
She hopes. She hopes and prays the other two will come out of the booth instead of calling for help, and so she runs the other way, back towards interrogation to draw them out. This is all for naught if they call in backup, and so she needs them to follow her.
She runs past Annie's cell, and then Peeta's. He shouts, something she can't pick up, probably not even about her or the guards, but about Katniss as usual, but she tunes it out. She slams into interrogation at the end of the hall, but of all of them, it's Annie who shoots first.
Enobaria almost smiles when Annie's shot strikes true, right in the fifth guard's flank. The last guard turns, shooting wildly, trying to stay alive, but Enobaria shoots him in the back as he turns away from her, back towards the sound of Annie firing. She leans against the door to interrogation and sighs, taking a deep breath. She's just killed five men and she feels nothing but satisfaction, or maybe it's relief. There's a satisfaction that the men who had made her life hell are dead, and she can feel her adrenaline leaving, giving way to fatigue.
Enobaria goes to the booth and opens Annie's cell. Annie isn't sure what this means. Had she been working alone? Was this a rebel plan? There were days and days and days of nothing, and then suddenly, all the guards are dead. She hesitates, unsure of what to do, exactly. There are two bodies in the corridor, and she's got nothing but a bedsheet for clothes.
They had raped her, just once, or twice, really, she supposed - two guards had had their way with her - before she was taken out of the prison on an outing, and President Snow let her know no one would touch her again, that she was a valuable asset. She isn't sure why, exactly, but it fills her with dread, and still does. She doesn't understand why the President cares so much about what happens to her. That evening, when she got back, they had taken off the fancy dress she wore in front of the president, and they had put her back in her cell without her clothes, and so she remained that way ever since. Untouched, off-limits, but exposed all the same.
So once her door is open, Annie tiptoes out of her cell, determined to find clothes of some sort, and to see if she can't let Peeta out. Enobaria hadn't unlocked his cell, only Annie's. Peeta only wants to hurt Katniss, she's heard him say so a thousand times. Even if such an idea is misguided, he's no danger to any of them.
There's a storage room behind the guard booth, Annie finds, and there are spare uniforms in there. She pulls out a fresh one and puts it on, and it feels good to have something to wear, even if she is still completely filthy, with tangled hair and teeth that are probably rotting, and overgrown nails, and about a hundred other complaints. And you shot a man, a voice in her head nags.
She had gotten through her Games without killing another tribute, and here she had shot a man with only seconds to think about it. He was going to kill Enobaria. He had already tortured Johanna and raped Enobaria. He was holding a gun of his own. She searches for justification after the fact, but the truth is, none of it had mattered in the moment. At the time, she had just shot. Her mind was settled, determined that in order to escape, to have a chance to get back to Finnick, she had to listen to Enobaria, and so she killed that man, and now she has to live with the consequences.
After she's dressed, Annie looks around at the areas she's never been allowed to explore. The guards' booth includes a control panel of various lock/unlock switches, and has an urge to open them all, but stops at the last moment, considering that perhaps the door to the outside may have more guards waiting, more men with guns prepared to kill them. She instead just finds the switches for each of their cells and opens those instead.
Within the booth there are cameras to all of the prison areas: the interrogation room, where she sees Enobaria talking to Johanna, the cells, where she sees Peeta currently hunched over and muttering to himself, and the corridor, where she sees the three dead bodies. She imagines the guards in the booth must have really been slacking at their job, to not see that something was amiss in interrogation, before succumbing to their own deaths. And behind the booth there is a break room of sorts, stocked with some food, a bathroom, and various other supplies.
The exit is beside the guard booth, but there's no camera looking out. Annie doesn't dare open that door yet, not without consulting the others. In fact, she hadn't even been sure all the guards were dead until she saw the other three in interrogation, laying around the chair where Johanna sat, blood draining into the grate on the floor. She lets herself exhale then, telling herself to calm down. They are alone; this is good. She can try to get back to Finnick, now.
The door unlocks again. He clenches, feeling his muscles tighten without even thinking about it, his body's response to anyone unlocking his cell at this point. No one ever came for anything good - the meals came in through a little slot, so it wasn't that. It was either being dragged aboveground, into the dazzling sun with confusing, harried instructions he can barely follow, a camera in his face the whole time, and likely blows to follow if he doesn't do everything exactly right, or it's the stings, the pinches that addle his mind and poison his thoughts.
He can't keep anything straight anymore. Everything leads back to Katniss, and he can't even remember why. Is it because she is the one who did this, who got him locked up in this place? They showed him the video of District 12 burning, bombed to nothingness. That was Katniss, he is told. There is something there, a warm, nostalgic feeling when he thinks of her, and he wants to snuff it out.
No one comes. The cell has been open for a couple minutes, and no one has come to fetch him. He turns from the corner he has been sitting in, and he sees a man lying dead in the corridor outside his cell. The memory of the gunshots comes back delayed, asynchronously. He had heard it, a few minutes ago, and he hadn't turned to look. His ears are ringing, but the injection they give him makes his ears ring anyways, makes him hear and see things that aren't there, so he just thought this was more of the same.
He realizes that one of two things is happening. Either the guards are dead and he has been let out of cell, or he has gone completely insane.
They have to do something about the bodies. Johanna is no help, since she can barely move herself, but she listens to them bicker. Enobaria and Annie try to move one of the bodies from the hallway by themselves but fail, and Annie suggests she go get Peeta for help. Enobaria protests, saying they better wait to open his cell, but Peeta appears in the doorway, surprising them all. "Help with what?" he asks.
He's gaunt, his skin sort of yellowish, probably a side effect of whatever they injected him with plus fading bruises. But he sounds more or less in his right mind, and the three of them together manage to drag the remaining three bodies into the one room. Annie helps Johanna stand from the chair and step over the bodies, and she detaches the electrodes Johanna had forgotten about, and they walk out of interrogation.
Johanna is so tired, and everything hurts, and now that the men who made her life hell are dead, all she wants to do is sleep. She realizes, hypothetically, that she should do something different. That the guards are dead, so she isn't a prisoner any longer, or maybe she still is, and so she should get out of this place as soon as she can, before anyone else comes and takes over their torture. But all of that seems like too much to consider right now, so when Annie helps her walk over the puddles of blood in the corridor between the cells, she probably intends to lead her to the guards' booth, but Johanna turns off back at her cell.
"You don't have to-"
"I just want to lay down." She knows what Annie is saying. That the cell has bars, that the cell makes them prisoners. That the cell can be locked again. But the cell has a cot, with a mattress, thin as it is, and Johanna is already about to collapse. She usually doesn't have to bring herself back to the cell, she usually just wakes up there.
Annie acquiesces, and Johanna lies down on the cot, which she can see is filthy with dirt and blood. It probably stinks, but she stinks too, and she's long gone blind to the bad odors of this place.
Johanna doesn't know how long she sleeps before she wakes to the earth shaking. It feels as if their underground prison is going to cave in. The lights flicker and then turn off, and she hears a scream - Annie. All around there is a rumbling, a horrible noise, like fireworks or an earthquake or something she has never heard before, but she is somewhere underground and the noise is outside, and now she can't even see, she's just listening to it go on and on and on.
Enobaria gropes around desperately for a flashlight. She thinks she remembered seeing one, somewhere, in the guards' breakroom, but she'd only looked through the room once, and now she can't remember where she'd seen it, or if she'd really just imagined it.
The world is silent again, but the silence itself is eerie, punctuated only by Annie quietly crying and Peeta muttering. "Johanna, you there?" she calls, because Johanna hadn't made a noise through the entire cacophony.
"…Yeah."
Enobaria feels her way to Johanna's cell. The corridor between the cells is easy to navigate, at least, since it's just a straight line flanked by bars. The idea that there are six corpses at the end of it is off-putting, however. She knows all the locks disengaged during the power outage; she had heard the exit click open. Her paranoia is growing that they had messed up, that one of the guards is still alive, that he would crawl out of the interrogation room like a zombie, ready to continue to hurt them. "Are you alright?" she asks, once she gets to Johanna's cell.
Enobaria knows it's a stupid question the second she asks it. She had watched the guards electrocute Johanna earlier that day, as they had done dozens of times before. But they had both been Mentors for a few years, she thinks Johanna would understand what she means. "Are you alright?" was a common enough question, even after a night with a client you'd rather scrub from your memory.
"A little hungry," Johanna says, which is all Enobaria can hope for. They'd probably never be alright again, but they needed to figure out how to keep going, at least for now, because it feels like she's back in the Games. She doesn't have time to process all of the horrors happening to her, because it still feels like she's in imminent danger. Annie had been crying for the past hour, and Peeta had been mumbling some nonsense she couldn't make any sense of, but Johanna, at least, was composed. She was an unlikely ally, but Enobaria would take what she could get.
"There's food this way. I'm searching for a flashlight, too."
Enobaria helps Johanna up and leads her to the guards' breakroom. She practically drags her, to be honest, since Johanna was pretty unsteady, and sits her in one of the chairs. She hands her a protein bar and a bottle of juice. She can hear the sounds of the wrapper crinkling while she continues her search.
"Oh, I think I found a crank radio," Peeta says.
This startles her, only because ten minutes prior, he was perseverating on mutts and other things she couldn't make heads or tails of. But now, suddenly, he seemed to be more or less himself. Annie is still out front in the booth, Enobaria can hear her sniffling, as she had been since the power went out. More and more, it feels like her own Games, the arena where the lighting turned from pitch black to blindingly bright every 12 hours. She had survived that. She had made it through a death game without her sight before. She just needs to stay calm.
"Hey, Annie, you seen a flashlight?" she asks.
The sniffling stops, and she hears footsteps. "Maybe… was it on that shelf on the left, in the back?"
Enobaria tries the shelf in question, hands feeling first the top shelf, then the second, then the third. And there it is, no- two flashlights! She turns them on, and can see them all. Johanna, halfway through a sip of juice, Peeta, fumbling with the dials on the radio, and Annie, with red eyes, leaning in the doorway of the room.
"Well, now we can get the hell out of here," she says.