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Johanna Mason did not think of herself as a good person.
In fact, she’d been told by multiple people that she most certainly wasn’t.
“Johanna.” She could already hear the disappointment in her father’s voice, and she knew exactly where this conversation was going. The rumours about Johanna and the shoemaker’s daughter must finally have made it to the lumberjacks. Fucking delightful.
“I need you to think of how this makes our family look. We don’t have much, so we need to keep up what we have: the appearance of a respectable family.”
Johanna chose to get up and leave the table rather than stay and scream at her father (as he very much would have deserved). Her love life was none of his business, and she would not stay around to be lectured. She had just managed to tie her boots as her father’s voice echoed through the house behind her.
“I know you’re going to see her, and I just want you to know that you’re not doing this out of love: you’re doing this out of cruel selfishness.”
Johanna slammed the door behind her as she left.
--
“Jo, you know this makes you a bitch, right?” Finnick laughed, hugging the pillow she’d thrown at him to his chest.
“Here I am spilling out my deepest, darkest secrets to you, and all I get is a pillow to the head.” He shook his head. “No wonder people rank you as one of the top five meanest Victors alive.”
--
“I will not lie to you Miss Mason. Don’t you now try and lie to me.” Snow's voice was that of a schoolteacher chiding an unruly child. Johanna couldn't even bring herself to fully care.
She didn’t know what more to say. She hadn’t wanted them to die, never.
“You, Miss Mason, are not a good person, and your decision to leave that room was not made in a moment of panic.”
She hadn’t wanted them to die. But she wasn’t a good person.
And Snow was right: her decision had been made in a rare moment of clarity, of realisation.
Realisation that she was going to suffer through this for many years to come.
Realisation that she would take her anger out on everyone around her but the people responsible, and knowing her family would be punished for every little slip-up she made.
Realisation that they were going to suffer no matter what, so she might as well put them out of it sooner rather than later (and maybe save herself some pain in the process).
The choice to leave had seemed so logical.
Not like the good and right one, but like the necessary one.
That moment of clarity had been fleeting.
Now, in the President’s office (her family in ashes, her bruises still fresh) she was beginning to regret not just killing herself instead of enduring all this bullshit.
Johanna Mason was not a good person.
Her dad, her best friend, and the former President were all in agreement on that.
They were all also dead.
Screw them all.
Screw Snow, who deserved a way more painful death than the one he’d gotten, in case anyone bothered to ask Johanna. She had been forced to murder, she had seen her loved ones killed, she had been tortured, and all of it could be traced back to him.
The worst regret of her life would be not killing him herself.
She supposed she would have to make do with living on just to spite him or some shit like that (and loudly cursing him as often as she could, just in case any gods were still listening and able to murder him over and over in whatever shit afterlife he’d hopefully ended up in).
Screw her father, who’s blood she’d never be able to wash of her hands. (And fuck Snow once again, he was to blame for that as well.)
Her dad would argue that she had herself to blame just as much; that her family’s deaths only exposed the selfishness she had always harboured. But he was dead and couldn’t tell her any of that, she just had to hear his words from inside her own mind.
The disappointment on his face was even worse when she couldn’t turn away from him.
Johanna supposed that her father had gotten what he wanted after all: he was the voice of some kind of consciousness for her. It might have made them even, in some grand metaphorical nonsense way. But it didn’t change the fact that he was dead, she wasn’t, and none of them would be able to fully forgive the other.
And then Finnick.
Finnick, who was the one who was meant to come out of this alive.
Finnick, who had people left to love.
She hoped he was ashamed of himself, daring to die with life in front of him. Daring to die without taking her with him. Did drunken midnight vows mean nothing to him?
Screw him, for leaving her with nothing but broken promises and empty space.
Johanna Mason was not a good person.
She spoke (and often whished) ill of the dead.
She was selfish. She was cruel. She was prone to anger.
She was a murderer, a whore, and a liar.
But she was alive, somehow.
And maybe that had to count for something.
--
Johanna Mason was not a good person.
Annie Cresta was.
“Move in with me,” Annie had told her one day.
And Johanna had promptly responded that she wasn’t going to move in with someone just so they could try to take care of her, and that she much preferred it here in Seven where she could be alone in her misery.
“Damn you Johanna, I’m asking for my own benefit, not yours.”
So Johanna had shown up in Four, with an axe and a very roughly made cradle, to ask Annie Cresta (technically Odair, she supposed, damn him for dying) face to face what the fuck she thought Johanna had to offer.
Curiosity, she would claim, was the only reason she’d even boarded the train to get there at all.
A couple weeks into living in her new home she figured that Annie hadn’t lied when she said that she just needed another pair of hand to take care of her new-born son. She had just omitted the part where she desperately also wanted company that understood.
Johanna also started to suspect that Annie wanted someone around who was more afraid of water than Annie herself was. Everyday Annie would force them all out on a walk, getting closer and closer to the sea every day.
Neither of them could even fully stand taking a shower yet.
She decided that Annie was not only a liar by omission, she was clearly a bit selfish too.
Johanna was no stranger to selfishness.
She stayed.
--
Johanna acquired tools to make the cradle less rough, and she laughed at Annie’s obsession over blanket colours. They went to the beach and slowly started taking longer and longer showers, making a game out of who could use up more hot water. (And if both of them cried the day Johanna took a warm bath that left only cold water for Annie in the shower, well, maybe they both felt like they'd won.)
They developed a routine, eventually. They would go to the markets together, and they kept the pantry stacked for days when neither of them were well enough to make it out of the house. Johanna swore over food forgotten too long on the stove, and Annie gladly told her how shit it tasted.
And maybe neither of them were truly good people, but they made themselves too busy to think about it most of the time.
--
Days and weeks and months passed and as the autumn storms came, the nights in the little house grew louder. If it wasn’t the little boy screaming and crying, afraid of the wind and the thunder, it was Annie or Johanna talking and rambling, anything to not have to hear the silence that followed when the boy finally fell asleep.
“I didn’t really think I’d live to see this day, if I’m being honest,” Annie confessed a late November night. “I used to imagine it a lot with Finnick, what a world would look like in our fantasy.” She paused her knitting to look at Johanna. “I never thought of it as more than a fantasy, and I didn’t ever imagine it would become a reality without him.”
Johanna didn’t know what to say to that.
--
She had never been able to imagine an “after”.
But the after had come, no matter how unprepared she’d been to be around for it.
And screw it, this morning the beach was more beautiful than anything connected to water had any right to be.
And Johanna still didn’t think she was a good person, but everyone she’d care to argue about it with were dead.
So screw it, she was going to be happy in the end, ghosts and nightmares be damned.
Fuck everyone and everything, she was going to admire this sunrise.