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It's a surreal experience to meet Annie Cresta. The fact that Johanna lived in the Capitol full time, the fact that she had a nationally broadcast television show, that was ultimately due to the fact that she had done a favor for Finnick who was trying to keep Annie from needing to ever come back to the Capitol, and yet here she was Mentoring for the Quarter Quell with absolutely no experience. She looks too young, even though she's older than Katniss and Peeta. There's an innocence about her as someone who won her Games without killing another Tribute.
Jackson is there, too, the only other living District 7 Victor, dragged back to the Capitol to Mentor her and Blight, currently standing on a balcony off the main room of the Welcome Party, both of them smoking pipe tobacco.
She tries to look around at the other Tributes, trying to gauge who is part of the alliance, who knew there was a plan to end the Games early. They didn't let her in on the whole plan, and she understood why, but because of that she had to guess at who was an ally and who would be a true enemy in the arena.
For her, the Games wouldn't be a last-man-standing death battle, they would be survival game, a clock that started counting down from 48 hours the second she was lowered into the arena. If she could stay alive, someone would come for her. That idea was the only thing keeping her sane.
Chaff and Seeder definitely understood, and Finnick and Mags, of course. She thinks the pair from 3 might, but everyone else is hard to tell. Katniss and Peeta definitely don't, from the way Katniss is sizing them all up. But of course, all of them except for the pair from 2 have been Mentors together before. Even if they didn't all get along, they knew each other, they had connections. For Katniss and Peeta, this was just another Games with a new group of strangers to kill.
Johanna sidles up to Enobaria and Cashmere, who are sipping on drinks while eating their second plates of food, a last minute effort to bulk up before the arena, where food is not guaranteed. "The girl on fire is shooting daggers at you," she tells Enobaria. "What did you do to her?"
Enobaria shrugs. "I think she really hates District 2. Gotta be careful not to take an arrow to the neck first thing."
"Don't even joke."
Enobaria gives her a placating smile and drops the subject. "Get some dinner, I know you don't like to eat when you're nervous, but you'll regret it when you're starving tomorrow."
Johanna's certainly more fit than she was in her first Games. She'd had months of warning this time, months to eat better, go to the gym, retrain her skills with her weapons, put on some weight. But she has to admit that in the last week, when it became reality that she really would be going back into the arena, her bad habits had flared up again, and she had skipped some meals, slept terribly, and skipped more workouts than she participated in. It culminated in a training score of 7, which she was not particularly proud of, but she was used to being the underdog. And she didn't have to win, she just had to endure. She was a champion of endurance. They all were.
So she eats, and talks, and generally tries to have an ok time, because she knows that despite all of her plans, despite her plan to just lay low and survive for two days, things could go very, very wrong. She could get killed right away. She could die in some trap in the arena - tracker jackers or a mutt or some natural disaster. Or worst of all, the promised help, the early end to the Games could never arrive, and the Games will play out as planned, forcing her to kill or be killed against people she's known for years.
She sees Sep before she leaves the party, and he looks somber, a contrast to the Capitolites smiling as they party around them. "Johanna, listen," he says. "I'll be rooting for you all the way. But if you don't make it out of there, it's been excellent, working as your manager."
Of course he has no idea about the plan. Of course, to Sep, her chances of winning are 1 in 24. She hadn't said anything special in her final taping of the show, but she'd seen her 'thank you very much' repeated in news segments and tabloids afterward. Panem would be watching her in this Games. "Thanks, Sep, for everything," she says. She wishes for a Trank, for something to give her one good sleep before plummeting into the arena, so she's not tossing and turning with worry, and he grants her wish, a half-tab of green left in her hand after their goodbye handshake and hug.
And when she wakes up, it's time. The pill worked perfectly, and unlike her first time going into the arena, she's well-fed, well-rested, and she has a plan. She has no idea if she can execute it, but she at least has some idea of what needs to be done. She knows she needs to watch out for Brutus, and he cautious of Districts 5, 8, 9, and 10. And Katniss's bow, since she doesn't trust any of them.
And then, she's in the arena. Her first thought is 'fuck, water', followed by 'yes, an axe' as she catches it gleaming in the Cornucopia. But the Cornucopia is on the other side of the water, water that she needs to swim across to either get to weapons or to land to run away. They put the cache on an island, this time.
She jumps in, and immediately remembers what a weak swimmer she is. She wonders if she really is going to die minutes into the Games, and for such a stupid reason. She had months to train, she knew she was going to be in the Games for ages, and yet she never worked on swimming.
And then she feels an arm tugging her along, almost inhuman in its efficiency. Finnick. They get to the island quickly, him taking off to the Cornucopia, her falling behind, sputtering and choking on the water that wanted desperately to get into her lungs. But she needed to get to that axe, and so eyes burning and throat raw, she runs towards it, heedless of who is behind her.
Axe in hand, she turns, and Finnick is gone, somehow, but there's the man from 5, Porter, already fighting with Brutus, and losing, badly. She catches a glimpse of Finnick, with Katniss, but then she sees Graham, the male from District 9, charging towards her.
Did he have a death wish? Why was he coming at her now, instead of later, when he could get a sneak attack? She imagines this has to be some adrenaline-fueled mistake he's making, but she's back in the Games, and she wants to live. She sees the metal pipe he's picked up, and he has a little more reach than she does, so she has to throw the axe. One chance to hit him before he hits her.
She aims, and the blade strikes true, right in his chest. He falls back on the sand. It's ugly and gory, and it feels just like it did all those years ago, when she was in the arena the first time. Like it was fine, like she is in a different reality where murder is fine, actually. It's kill or be killed, now, so she's doing what is demanded of her. In her first Games she had run away from the Cornucopia. This is her first time ever seeing the blood bath.
And it's not great. She sees bodies on the sand, bodies in the water. There's a tugging at her collar, a rough "it's me!" that she recognizes to be Blight, and she takes off with him. He shows her how to activate the flotation device on their suit, and they leave the Cornucopia once she reclaims her axe from the man's chest. She wants to know how Finnick is, how Cashmere is. Mostly, she wishes she could see Enobaria, to know that she's alright. But she and Blight move away from the Cornucopia and she mentally keeps repeating to herself: survive until tonight, then all day tomorrow, then until the next night. Just stay alive.
She's used to working with Blight, more or less, since they've been Mentors together for years. He's agreeable, even if he is jonesing for tobacco, and she knows that between them, she's always had the shorter temper. She knows that they have a sort of forced bond by nature of being from the same District, that otherwise they probably would never talk to each other, but he was the one who made sure she ate proper meals back when she was going back to District 7 in the off-season, and she was the one who relieved him in the Mentor booth, since Jackson refused to return to the Capitol.
So now, both of them back in the arena, it's nice to have someone with her that she can trust, even if he's not the most fit, even if he's perhaps a little more slow and more cautious than she. She climbs a tree to get a view of the entire arena, using her axe to help her ascend.
She continues climbing, until she can see over most of the tree tops. The arena looks largely uniform all the way around, except that there are lines dividing 10- no, 12 segments in the water section in the center. "What do you see?" Blight calls up.
"It kind of looks like a clock?" she says, but she has no idea what that could mean. "There's a really tall tree on the other side. If this is a clock, that has to be 12."
"We were dropped in at 10AM, and less than an hour has passed. What segment are we in now?"
She tries to figure it out, counting from the large tree. "Five, maybe? Definitely five or six."
"Do you see anything happening in 10 or 11 o'clock?"
She climbs higher, trying to see through the tree cover of those segments. There's nothing, at least not that she can see. She climbs back down. "No idea. If something is happening, it's below the tree line."
Blight nods. "We have to assume it's a clock. That each hour something will happen in that segment, or each hour that segment is safe."
She nods, agreeing with this conclusion. "Well, we're in the 5 o'clock segment right now and nothing is happening, so let's wait out the hour to be sure, and then we can just avoid the segment of the hour that it is?"
He nods. "And avoid everyone else."
Johanna knew that if their conclusion of the clock was correct, it was only a matter of time before the Mentors would disseminate the information to the other Tributes, probably by sending a watch or something. "We should move to the edge," she says. "We can watch for gift parachutes and see where people are."
They move to the edge of the trees and Johanna can clearly see the dividing lines in the water. "Let's move over a couple," she says. They hike across two markers, still out of sight of the beach, until they're in the 7 o'clock segment. Then they hunker down under a pile of leaves in a thatch of tree roots, gazing out towards the water. It takes a while, Johanna realizing that she is getting thirsty and hungry, but then, finally, they see two parachutes enter the arena.
One floats down across the way, into what Johanna thinks is the 3 o'clock wedge. And one goes right next to them, to 8 o'clock. Johanna shivers, wondering who was waiting just a few hundred feet away. She and Blight fall silent, listening.
"-It's just the basic kit," says a voice, faintly. Johanna closes her eyes, sighing. She is almost certain it's Brutus. She strains her ears to hear more. "She got me good, I was hoping for a Zinger."
Brutus was injured, and he hadn't gotten anything more than a basic first aid kit to help. She can work with that. She wants to move away from him, but it had to be nearing 6 o'clock, so they couldn't go backwards unless they wanted to risk whatever was in that segment, and she didn't want to risk exposure by swimming out towards the Cornucopia. She turns to Blight. "We have to take him out," she mouths.
"Someone is with him," he replies, just as silently.
They listen, waiting for another voice. "God I'm thirsty," it said, finally. "I got a stomach full of salt water."
Gloss.
It was a challenge. Both were more fit, both had a size advantage. But she knew her enemies in the 8 segment. She didn't know what she was facing in the arena. If it was a mutt, or tracker jackers, she'd die a hideous, awful death. She nods, steeling herself. She'd killed a 1 boy to win her Games, against all odds. She'd have to do it again. "Ready?" she asks Blight. He nods.
They creep over the boundary into the 8 o'clock segment. It takes a bit to find the other pair, but Brutus isn't exactly quiet, hissing as he applies the antiseptic to the wound in his calf. Gloss is a little ways away, studying the forest, looking for something, obviously. Johanna signals to Blight to keep his eyes on Gloss, and she sneaks around behind Brutus, axe in hand.
He notices her at the very last second, but that just means that her strike only injures him very badly, instead of killing him outright. He yells, in pain and shock, and falls to the forest floor, blood absolutely everywhere, her axe still embedded deep in his shoulder. She needs to get away but he grabs her ankle, dragging her back to him. His grip is impossibly strong, and Blight is a blur somewhere in her periphery, now engaged with Gloss, but she cannot focus on that, because Brutus has his hand around her throat. Just one hand, as the other is reaching to pull the axe out from his shoulder. She is going to be killed with her own axe. She tries to cry, to beg for her life, but all that comes out is a sputtering cough as she is being strangled. She kicks against Brutus but it doesn't matter, she is getting weaker and weaker, and his body feels inhumanly strong.
And then there's an axe buried in the top of his skull. He goes slack, and she collapses on top of his corpse, momentarily boneless as the oxygen take a minute to return to her limbs and brain. It was Blight's axe, and she expects to see Blight waiting for her when she raises herself up, but it's Gloss. Gloss had killed Blight, and then Brutus. She falls back, too afraid to get to her feet, and awkwardly shuffles backward away from Brutus's dead body.
"Wait! Please!" Gloss says, holding his bloody hands up to show that he no longer has a weapon. "Let's work together!"
Her neck aches, her ankle is sore from where it twisted at an odd angle when Brutus grabbed it. But she's alive, and Gloss doesn't want to fight her. She looks at Blight, bleeding on the forest floor a few meters away. One good chop to the neck, a death blow. She hopes he didn't suffer much.
She nods. "Ok."
Gloss explains that the water is inside of the trees. She swings her axe into a tree, letting water dribble out, enough to clean her blade, her hands, her face from mud and sweat and blood. She cuts another hole, lower, and they use the aluminum tube from the ointment in Brutus's first aid kit to make a spile and get a few mouthfuls of water each. "It's gotta be almost eight," she says, "Let's move."
"What?"
It doesn't take long to explain to Gloss how the arena works, and he agrees with the strategy of outrunning the hours. What she doesn't know is if he knows the Games are supposed to end early, or if he just sees her as a stepping stone for his Victory. She resents him for killing Blight, but she and Blight did attack first, so she decides to tolerate him. It's when he moves closer to her as they walk, pinning her against a tree and pushing himself against her that she knows something is up.
He is gay, she knew that much about him. She isn't sure most people did, so she assumes this is something for the cameras. "Enobaria explained," he whispers, kissing her neck.
Perhaps it should disgust her, but she's received affection from so many men she's felt nothing for that it doesn't even feel strange anymore. She plays along, shoving him away. "We're in the Games!" she protests, loud enough for a microphone to pick up.
"Sometime tomorrow night, right?" he whispers, pushing her hair back.
She nods. "That's what I heard," she answers, barely opening her mouth, before she kicks him in the shins. He exaggerates how painful it is, which she appreciates. "Now leave me alone!"
There are too many canons that night. Too many people died for a Hunger Games where the idea was that they would be taken out, rescued. She watches the sky for an indication of who has died, sighing in relief when she doesn't see Enobaria or Finnick or Cashmere or Katniss. One more day. She could last 24 hours.
Gloss keeps watch first, and she takes the second watch. They realized that it was impossible to backtrack: due to the way the clock worked, they had to continue forward always. But because most of the others kept towards the inside of each segment, at the beach, they could often go unnoticed by taking the longer route on the periphery of the arena. And so it went that they ended up on a long hike for much of the second day.
Finally, the evening of the second day, they agree it's time to meet up with the others. "Should we go back to the beach?" she asks.
"Yeah, we should be able to find them easily from there."
It's about 9, and they are in the 10 o'clock segment, so she is feeling fine about that, but they are less careful than usual, perhaps, about potential enemies, and so she misses June leaping out of the bushes with a machete, going straight for Gloss.
Gloss is able to lift Blight's axe in time, but June still manages to get a strike in, right through his chest. "No!" Johanna cries, throwing her axe, her aim deadly accurate, and landing right in June's chest. Both June and Gloss fall back to the sand, and Johanna digs out the rest of Brutus's first aid kit: gauze, antiseptic, a needle and thread. Nothing that would mend a massive slash from a blade that appeared to have nicked at least two arteries. June's eyes are already staring placidly up at the sky.
"Tell… Cashmere…" Gloss is struggling to speak, his breath a wheeze.
"Fuck. Ok, tell her what?"
He beckons her closer, and she leans right over him, his blood mixing with Brutus's on her uniform. "Don't. Trust. 13." He whispers this in her ear, and then she feels him go limp, and she's left with two dead Victors laying beside her. She wants to scream and how unnecessary this is, but that goes for every Hunger Games. She needs to find Katniss. They're coming to get Katniss, so she needs to be there when they come.
She works her way around the beaches, cautious now for anyone else still alive. 10 o'clock, then 11 o'clock. At the 12 o'clock segment she pauses. It's dark, but she can see something. There is someone left on the beach. It's Cashmere, she realizes, an arrow in her temple. The hovercraft had not collected her body. She had just recently died. The others were nearby. She smooths Cashmere's hair and tries to swallow down the wail that is threatening to come out. She rinses off in the water, just in the shallows, removing some of the blood and grime from her uniform. Her hair is tangled and stiff from the salt water, and she's sure she looks terrible compared to the perfect, bright presence Panem was used to seeing on her game show. But she didn't have time to worry about that now. She could die in a moment out here.
She makes her way up the hill towards the big tree, hoping if nothing else she could climb it and get an idea of where everyone else was. There couldn't be many of them left, which meant there was less chance of her being attacked, but it also makes it harder for her to find them.
But then, after maybe an hour of sneaking through the underbrush, she hears them. The sun has long since set, and she has to rely on sound and just little glimpses of movement. "This way," one voice is saying. Finnick?
She follows it up a ridge, and she sees it: the largest tree she has perhaps ever laid eyes on. She sees the silhouette of Finnick, along with Peeta. "How did he say to do it?" Peeta asked.
Finnick curses, adjusting something. "I think we have it right. I… I didn't think we'd have to do it ourselves."
"Fin?" she asks, stepping out from where she was hiding in shadow. She'd watched enough to determine it was safe, at least for the moment.
He blinks in her direction, his grip on the trident tightening. "Jo?" he asks, and then he runs to her. It feels good to embrace Finnick, to hold onto him, to know that he was real and safe and they were so close. "It really is you!"
"Where's Enobaria?"
"She's with Katniss. She's ok."
Johanna wants to point out that Cashmere very definitely had one of Katniss's arrows in her head and so this wasn't exactly a safe place for Enobaria to be, but she is interrupted as Blase, the boy who won the Games for District 10 only a few years ago is there, bow and arrows of his own in hand. Had he killed Cashmere?
She doesn't have time to think about this as Blase aims for Peeta. She doesn't hear the words he's saying, she just runs the couple steps from Finnick to him and tackles Peeta, the two of them slipping to the edge of the ridge, then tumbling over. It hurts, and they fall and fall. The ridge is full of plants, but it's also covered in rocks and roots, and by the time she and Peeta stop falling, her entire body aches.
"Can you move?" she asks him.
"I think so. You?"
"Yeah."
He pants for a few seconds, then sits up, looking around at where they are. They're not quite back to the beach, but she thinks they fell at an angle, towards the 1 o'clock segment. "Why did you do that?" he asks.
Why? It was instinct, really. That boy, if he was the one to kill Cashmere, had skills. He would have murdered Peeta in seconds. But she trusts Finnick. Finnick could take down that twerp of a boy. She had to trust Finnick. "Because I wanted you to live more than him," she says, the simplest way to put it without saying something treasonous on the microphones.
"But you don't even know me," he says.
"Do you know me?" she asks.
"Of course I know you, everyone knows you."
"Same thing," she says.
There's a rumbling, an ominous vibration in the arena, and Johanna can feel the pressure change. It's the first time she's been in a segment on the hour, and a fear settles in her gut. "What happens now?" she asks Peeta.
"The lightning," he says.
This doesn't explain anything, but the crackling that starts to intensify makes her fear deepen. "Are we going to die?" she asks him, as if he might know the answer.
"Hopefully, this ends it," he says, his answer purposely vague, but she had forgotten, she had forgotten that the Games were about to end. She had been so certain that Katniss knew nothing that she didn't realize Peeta might know some of the plan. And that was the trick, she supposed. Katniss grabbed so much attention, it allowed Peeta to operate without many eyes on him. Johanna grabs onto him, her entire body aching, and they gaze up on the ridge and watch.
The lightning crackles, seeming to strike the tree before traveling up along some sort of cable up, and up, and up, to the top of the arena. And then everything is pitch black. She doesn't know which one of them is trembling - her or Peeta - but she can feel them shaking. "We need to get back there, they'll never find us down here!" he says, and she nods. Everything hurts, but if she's going to be rescued, if the Games are about to end, she can climb with a broken body one last time.
They scramble up the ridge in the dark as things start to change. Lights start to come back on, and the arena looks less like a jungle and more like… another synthetic construct of the Capitol. She climbs as fast as she can, slipping here and there, her arms becoming completely scraped up, but she continues, because she will not be left behind. She can hear a hovercraft, and she speeds up even more. "Hurry, hurry," calls a voice from the hovercraft. "We don't have much time."
"Over here!" she calls, her voice hoarse. They're just over the ridge now, about to crest. Peeta's just ahead, and he clambers up onto the flat ground on top of the hill, running towards the hovercraft.
"Wait, please, there's two more of us!"
She pulls herself up just in time to see it flying away, to realize with dread that she had done everything right, she had survived two days inside the arena, but she was not rescued. Somehow, she and Peeta were left behind.