Archive of Our Own

"Oh, for fuck's sake."

Johanna isn't sure if no one hears her or if everyone just ignores her. She's used to both. Either way, no one's paying attention to her, so in the commotion that suddenly snaps into life, crashing down with screams and shouts, she slips out.

She'd kill for a drink right now. She'd kill for a hit of something. For some kerosene and a lighter. She's killed for less before.

The screens in the square are still showing Katniss' face, her shrieks echoing around the streets. A bad look. More likely to make her a martyr, and indicative of just how deep surprise must have struck Plutarch, or how much control has slipped from his grasp. Johanna could not care less.

Right now, she's grateful for the chaos. Other people are screaming and jeering just for the hell of it, rushing around and pushing each other. There are guards swarming around the president's mansion but only near the front, blocking the doors and standing over the smashed corpse of the wrong president. No one is looking at the sides, at the back, at the trees that are tall enough to tap their branches against the window and sturdy enough to climb.

Come in, they say. Have at him. We'll stand watch.

No one will notice her absence. Annie barely knew she was there when they shared a room in District 13's hospital, despite the same grief over Finnick pouring out of them, flooding the halls. Haymitch will be far too busy with his little protege to pay her any attention, as usual. Nevermind that Katniss has been more oblivious than Johanna's been while floating on morphling. More self-centered too, for all that people both in and outside the Capitol love to call her a bitch. It figures Katniss and lover boy would be self-righteous and sanctimonious, but one of the few things she figured she could count on over the last couple of years was Haymitch's anger. Really, that was the one thing all the victors could share when loyalty was out of the question. Or so she'd thought.

So what if Coin had killed Katniss' sister? It's one sister for a legion of siblings and mothers and fathers Snow and his cronies killed over the decades. Oh, she figured it out on her own. She's had a lifetime of people telling her things and inviting her to things out of pity; even the Games hadn't put a stop to that, and perhaps the rebellion was proof of it, too. They got Annie out for Finnick and Peeta out for Katniss and Volts out for his bombs. They got her out because she was there and maybe, someone somewhere, had felt a little bit sorry for her. Now though, she has too much competition. Everyone has lost someone. Everyone's been brave. So she's disappeared, turned into a single pine needle lying on the forest floor amongst a sea of them. No one left to remember her, to find her, or just to talk to her, really.

Not that she ever needed anyone to. Especially not when it comes to anger and violence, her favourite kind of language, though perhaps that's just because it's the only one she's ever been taught. Johanna has eyes, and she knows things, and she thought sending a thirteen year old girl to an active warzone was stupid, which meant it was deliberate. It's not like Coin had tried to conceal her dislike towards Katniss very much, anyway. It was one of the few things Johanna actually liked about her.

Mostly, she liked that Coin wasn't Snow.

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. She should have known. After all, look where trusting others has gotten her. Look where following Katniss got Finnick. What has listening to Haymitch ever done for anyone, other than gotten a bullet lodged in a suit of armour and a skull full of scars and agony? What has Plutarch ever delivered on, other than an arena full of broken promises and shattered bodies and his own way?

She has no idea how they managed to win a war. They can't even shoot a president right.

She makes her way to the terrace. It occurs to her that she doesn't have a weapon, but she doubts she'll need one. After all, the first thing they teach you as a child in District 7 is that a dull axe can be more dangerous than a sharp one. There's more damage to be dealt in being out of control, when you don't know if the blade will strike or bounce, when your swings are careless. And Johanna's been controlled and careful for far too long now.

Perhaps she still can be, just to make it last. She wants to rip Snow apart, bit by bit. Tear off an ear and a pair of lips and a finger and shrivelled dick and hold them ransom, no price high enough. For a moment, she imagines that the mockingjay has actually done her a favour. That it will be better to see his face as she sets fire to every part of him than it would have been to see him struck with an arrow, clean and fast.

His hands are still bound to the post. It's not until she steps closer that she realises Snow lies crumpled, contorted. There's a dribble of blood by his mouth. Those grotesque lips of his are still twisted into a smile. His final exhale would have been a laugh. No one saw it, which is more privacy than any tribute ever got.

It's not fair.

"No!"

It's a yowl. It is the last shred of her, any kind of hope and fury and will she had left torn out.

She hears her name from all sides. Her foot finds Snow's face, his teeth giving way to the toecap of her boot, and with each kick his smile gapes wider and bloodier. It makes her stomp harder, wilder, the corpse still warm enough to bare the darkening marks of her heel on his face.

Strong hands grab at her, try to pull her off. She fights them, hand gripping Snow's thin hair and the soft and rich fabric of his clothing until her fists are full of it. It feels like nothing because it means nothing.

"He's dead he's dead he's already fucking dead!" she howls.

Someone throws her over their shoulder, carries her away from the terrace, and she thinks they must have seen Finnick do it in the arena, millions of years ago. As if this is just the protocol for dealing with Johanna Mason whenever she's angry or inconvenient or batshit. She screeches louder and beats her fists against their back, relishing in every gasp and stumble she causes.

In the end, it makes no difference. She's deposited unceremoniously on a plush lounge, one that's already stained with blood. One of the rebels, still allowed to dress in her District 8 uniform instead of the ugly grey thing the victors are made to wear, bends over her, fingers gripping tight on her arms, and shakes her.

"Soldier Mason," she orders.

"Fuck you!" Johanna spits, because she's not. She failed at that, too. And now Finnick is dead, and Snow is too, and so is half the country, and she doesn't feel any better. Nothing is any better.

Her throat is hoarse and ragged, threatening tears instead of shrieks, so she shuts up, and the woman gets out of her face. She clutches at her trophies from Snow and no one tries to take them from her. She stares at the blood smeared across her boots, wonders what it would taste like and how much poison is left inside.

The next time she looks up, she finds that most of the other victors have been herded into the same room. No one says much. Cressida and Pollux, their cameras off for once, dart in and out, mostly to murmur things to the rebels or direct them elsewhere. Katniss' cousin or whatever, the one with the nice jawline, pops his head in without seeming to actually see anything, keen eyes turned unusually dazed.

The room is cold and quiet and dull. Johanna wishes she had some morphling to prick herself with.

Eventually, Plutarch enters, hauling Haymitch in alongside him, his hand fisted in the collar of Haymitch's uniform. Haymitch seems rather indifferent to it, which means he's either drunk off his face, pretending to be, or he's actually feeling quite pleased with himself for making such a mess.

She searches for any kind of satisfaction in his face, and instead his eyes meet hers, flickering with concern as they pass over her, the remnants of Snow clutched in her hands. And then, quick as ever, he moves on to the rest of the room, roaming over it, until he zeroes in on the blood stains smearing the couch.

"Where's Katniss?" he asks.

"That really isn't your concern right now," says Plutarch, and it's nearly a growl.

"So she's unsupervised? With District 13 guards?" Haymitch pushes, raising his voice. Enough that Peeta nearly jumps up and Enobaria stills, given she was the one who saw the mobs up close. Someone else, still dressed in Capitol rags, claps their hand over their mouth.

"Cressida. Get me a report on Katniss," Plutarch relents. "Some footage too, if you can."

"And send Paylor's squad," adds Haymitch. "They're available. There aren't any presidents left to guard."

For a moment, she thinks Plutarch might actually hit Haymitch, which isn't something she thought he was be capable of. Shoving Haymitch into a hole to die from withdrawal, sure, but he's someone who needs to do it from a distance, and preferably on someone else's orders, so he can keep his hands clean. Just like how he could design the Games and dream up the deaths of a hundred tributes, but never win them himself. A lot like Snow in that way, really.

"Fine. I need to talk to all of you, anyway. Privately."

The non-victors disperse and Johanna finds herself being led back into the room she was just in, left to vote alone with Enobaria. Not good enough for her bloodlust to be denied over and over again, she then had to be judged for possessing it in the first place by the very people who should understand her convictions the most. Who should see themselves in her instead of placing themselves above her.

The victors sit down at the table. All except Haymitch, though Plutarch's grip on his uniform has finally loosened. He opts to remain behind Plutarch and a little to the side, right where everyone can see him.

Johanna notices that the only other person allowed to remain with them is Plutarch's floozy of an assistant, Fluvia or Fulvia or whatever her stupid name is. Johanna hasn't seen her since she went around pestering them about dorm rosters in District 13, before she'd been shipped off to some other district to direct war propos on the frontline, where it wasn't safe enough for Plutarch to go directly. Clearly, this is enough of a crisis for her to be reappointed to his side. Her head must be hurting from the expression of earnest concentration she's wearing.

Johanna's never seen Plutarch so angry before, his plans unravelled alongside his composure, his patience with them beyond spent. Not that he ever liked dealing with them to begin with. He takes a deep breath.

"My understanding is that you had a meeting with Alma before this…proceeding," he starts. "Would you care to tell me what, exactly, that was about?"

His eyes pass over her in favour of fixing on Volts, who's cleaning his glasses, and Peeta, pressing a bloodied tissue against his hand, his eyes shutting, squeezed tight, before they open again, alternating between glazed and frantic in quick succession.

"The Games. What else," Johanna finally answers, figuring that Annie counting to one hundred under her breath and Enobaria with her stupid teeth won't be much help, either.

Plutarch's gaze finds her, eyes flickering between her and Haymitch, and for once Johanna bristles at the association, if not its inherent comparison. She snaps, "I voted for them, if you were wondering."

He recovers himself, offering her one of those smiles that's probably meant to be placating, if not charming. She imagines punching his teeth in. "Thank you, Johanna. Yes, she did mention she would be discussing that with all of you. What was the verdict?"

"Yes," Peeta murmurs, staring at the table, his voice hoarse. "She voted yes. For Prim."

Johanna rolls her eyes. Nevermind everyone else in the room. No, fuck them and their revenge and their hypocrisy and whatever they voted for. For someone who claims to hate being in the public eye and the symbol of the revolution generally, it really does feel like Katniss can't stand the idea of anyone else being the centre of attention, and that the rest of District 12 is rather complicit in giving her that.

Plutarch has paled slightly, though he's sharper as he turns towards Haymitch, asks, "What did you vote for?"

And Johanna hates him for that, too, because she'd watched Haymitch stare at Katniss; had been inside the arena with her before that, and noticed the way Katniss studied the parachutes as if they carried some kind of code despite her not knowing about the bread, and then again in District 13 when Haymitch and Katniss had barely said a word to each other but had somehow managed have entire conversations with the slightest tilt of their heads or the blinks of their eyes, and she still has exactly zero idea as to what the ever loving fuck is going on there. All she knows is what Plutarch has already managed to guess: that Haymitch's answer was for Katniss, and Katniss alone, and that somehow Coin falling over the balcony feels like his fault almost as much as it would if he'd been the one shooting the arrow.

I'm with the mockingjay, she mocks in her head, because Haymitch's accent is stupid and more people should tell him that. How anyone ever found Katniss convincing or compelling, she'll never know. Then she thinks, I'm not with anyone. Not a single one of you. You can all rot.

Haymitch doesn't answer, and Plutarch's head snaps back to the rest of them. "What did he vote for? Did he vote with Katniss? What did he say?"

The audacity of this man to ask for honesty and loyalty when he's never offered the victors anything but the barest scraps would be fascinating, were it not so infuriating.

Volts finishes fiddling with his glasses, placing them back on the bridge of his nose, and stares at Plutarch. He frowns, cocks his head, looks past the man despite how much of him there is. "I don't remember. Didn't you abstain?"

"Yes. Yes, that definitely came up," Peeta says quickly, and when Johanna looks at him he looks like his old self, back when he and Caesar were practically holding hands, caught somewhere between a game of tug of war and leading the rest of Panem on a merry goose chase. "Because I voted no, so he didn't want to choose between Katniss and me."

Plutarch looks unconvinced, folds his arms over his chest. "He couldn't abstain, there's an odd number of you."

"Whose fault is that?" mutters Haymitch.

"I thought he tossed a coin," smirks Enobaria, teeth gleaming in the light. "I don't think the rest of us saw what the answer was, only the president. Tails, and he'd vote no. Heads, and - well, I think it goes without saying."

She cuts an invisible line across her throat with a fingernail, a gurgling choke dribbling out of her mouth.

"Oh, it wasn't a coin. It was a bottle cap," says Peeta.

"That reminds me. Can I get a drink?" drawls Haymitch.

Johanna hates them. She actually fucking hates them. She wants to scream. This cannot be the reason her body crackled with electricity or why she'll never be able to climb up by her favourite waterfall at home and feel the spray on her skin again, or even get caught in the rain without swallowing down hysteria - and it rains a lot in her district. This stupidity, this pettiness, cannot be what she was willing to die for.

Because none of this is about politics or virtue or loyalty. Not if Enobaria is involved, willing to cut anyone from either side if they got too close and just as willing to sell out anyone and switch allegiance if it would save her own skin; when Beetee has more blood on his hands than anyone in the room, yet was willing to save the children who cheered for everyone else's to spill; or when Peeta's only true interest is turning the image of Katniss assassinating someone in cold blood into one of his false memories so he can go home and live out his pathetic little fantasy of marrying and breeding her under the guise of calling it peace and unity. All the victors, still playing games despite everything long being lost, because it's all they know how to do.

She wishes she'd never agreed to be in on this. She wishes she'd died back in the arena. She wishes she'd never won. She wishes the Games had never existed and that she hadn't, either.

"Annie?" prompts Plutarch, biting back a sigh.

Annie's head pops up, forehead creased with confusion. She uses the time Plutarch takes to rephrase the question to study Haymitch, as if she might find something and know what to do with it. Johanna wonders if she's looking for the truth, to figure out if Haymitch would actually agree to another Games, and is tempted to point out that she she's either too stupid to know how her own husband would have really voted or too in denial for anything like the truth to be much use.

"He…he voted yes," says Annie, then shakes her head. "No, he voted no. Real or not real?"

Her eyes go wide, head jerking irregular as she looks around the room a little wilder.

"Oh, spare me the fucking waterworks," Johanna says, because if anyone knows how to spot a fake crier, it's her, and because Annie should probably reel it in if she doesn't want that burgeoning bump Johanna spotted back in the hospital to be questioned too deeply.

Writing Annie off with a wave of his hand, Plutarch returns to Johanna, looking at her in a new way. As if he's suddenly interested in what she has to say, in the fact that she always tells the truth simply for the spite of it, though that was the very thing that had made him lose interest in her after she won. For a moment, she stares right back at him, and thinks about how much she hates his face. Pasty and pudgy, with sharp little eyes - yet she'd been the one deemed to not have the right look or the right voice. Another reminder that she's never been the audience's favourite.

People always seem to forget she'd won anyway.

Johanna slides her gaze to Haymitch, wondering if he'll do something obvious like shake his head. Or, worse yet, look at her with pity. Instead, he looks at her honestly, or as close as he can get. No questions, no pleading, no sympathy. Just a mild curiosity as to what she might do. If she'll be the one to betray him.

"Don't look at me," says Johanna, flipping her head dismissively, her hair still too short for it to really have much effect. "I wasn't paying attention."

Plutarch's jaw shifts. He stops looking at any of them and withdraws, rubbing at his forehead like he has a headache. Tell her about it. Without a word, he walks out of the room, his assistant hurriedly following after him.

It's only a second later that Johanna and Haymitch have gotten up to pursue him, Beetee trailing a little further behind. Figures, she thinks. The others still aren't in on it all. Not really.

By now, a fresh throng of people have gathered in the main room. Johanna shoves her way through them, planting herself on the nicest, palest lounge she can find so she can dirty it with her boots. Haymitch sits himself adjacent to Plutarch again, which earns him a glare, though he isn't told to move. She doesn't know shit about chess, but she went to enough parties during the Games to know that Haymitch and Plutarch would usually end up having a match, and it could be something of a spectacle if you were bored enough. That you win with something called a checkmate, when there's nowhere else for your opponent to go. And right now, Plutarch doesn't want Haymitch inside the room just as much as he needs him to be close enough to keep an eye on, not trusting what he'll do on the outside.

She wishes they'd just wrestle already and get it over with.

More people file in. Johanna doesn't know most of them, only dots here and there. Pretty boy Gale, not sure where to stand now that there's no mockingjay to look for and no Coin to try and get the approval of. Peeta, face intent even as his eyes are muddled. Some of the District 13 recruits she trained with who didn't visit her in the hospital. A soldier stained with District 7 eyes and gnarled hands and freckles she doesn't know the details of.

She tries to imagine what Blight would do if he was here. If he would sit with her, if he would have voted with her. She wishes she was home and wonders what's left of it.

The victors attract their own fair share of stares, especially from the people observant enough to notice the fragments of hair and cloth in her fist. Maybe they think it's from the other president, that she's gloating instead of conserving. And nevermind that Beetee designed the weapons that helped win the war, or that Haymitch has been doing his best to undermine the Capitol since before half the people in the room could talk - all of them are eyed with the same degree of suspicion. Like they might be about to rise up, as if there are any other presidents to shoot and not just the fat Gamemaker they've all been more than happy to listen to for months.

I'm like you. I killed to survive, not for power, she wants to say, and even in her head she sounds like she's pleading. This all started with us.

"So," Plutarch begins at last. The room falls to a hush slower than Coin would manage, but that's what happens when a producer has to step into the role of director.

"We are in something of a predicament. I am still unclear as to how we got here," he glances at Haymitch, "but I'm opening the floor on how best to proceed."

He gestures to the lot of them. No one says anything.

"I say we eat Snow," Johanna states plainly. Fulvia's eyes nearly bug out of her head. "Cut out his heart, feed it to his granddaughter, tell her after, air it on television. There's your final Hunger Games, no arena required."

After all, there's always been a rather persistent rumour that Snow did that to one of the troublesome victors, just in the reverse order and without the evidence. No one knows for certain, because the victor had ended up dead anyway, of course, and the rest of them were a morbid lot whose tales regularly reflected that.

There's barely a rustle in the room. Johanna looks down, stares at the blood drying on her boot, lets it distract her from the fact that everyone's seen so much horror and gore, what she says can barely get a rise out of them anymore. Her fingers clench a little tighter around Snow's things, if only so no one can see them.

"Well, I nominate Johanna for Head Gamemaker, assuming the existing ones are due to be shot," says Haymitch eventually. "Or are we rehabiliating them?"

Plutarch doesn't look at him. The seconds stretch on. No one else says anything.

Finally, Plutarch slams his fist down onto the table with a resounding fleshy thud, making half the room jolt as if a shot's gone off. Haymitch's eyes flash with something, though he manages to fight the urge to look satisfied.

"We are aware this has the potential to destabilise our entire government and plunge us back into the civil war we just escaped from?" says Plutarch.

Some of the other rebels shift around Johanna, a mix of discomfort and terror and plain irritation at the prospect. Everyone must be exhausted, especially as they got to fight on the front lines instead of being tucked away in District 13. Perhaps the fractures between them have already started to form, or the Capitol loyalists are putting up more of a fight than expected. Johanna doesn't know the details, just as they don't know what it's like to be tortured for weeks on end by the Capitol. They didn't have to make nice to sponsors or try to help hopeless kids or pretend to look pretty for prying hands while fighting the urge to bite their fingers off. They got to be colleagues of Coin instead of a symbolic party trick, loved then hated by every side.

"We have no president, and the closest thing we have to an enemy is the symbol of our own revolution," Plutarch continues, sparking another lot of murmurs throughout the room. Gale's jaw tightens as he stares at the floor. "That means no presidential address, no peace ceremonies, our chances at true unification just decreased, and now you're saying," he turns to look directly at Haymitch, "we should dash the one tentpole programme we might have had for the summer. What are we supposed to air on television?"

Johanna wonders what this must look like to the rest of them, all the other rebels. They don't know enough, they can't. Not when they didn't see Haymitch and Katniss together up close, or the way Plutarch and Haymitch collaborated with barely contained distrust and hostility, even as they fed into each other's ideas. They never saw the arsenal in District 13. What must this look like to them when they don't know all the discussions that went into every camera angle, when they were on the battlefield but still needed to view Plutarch's propos to remind themselves to keep going? What must it be like to watch a television screen and believe everything you see without question?

If anything, Plutarch's animosity towards Haymitch has only revealed that he still regards him as being apart from the rest of the victors, if not from the rest of the rebels. The only one who was allowed to be in on every detail of the plot to blow the arena because he helped formulate it, who can still look something like a threat, who's swallowed down so many secrets he must be choking on them. Good.

Haymitch meets the his stare readily, as if the answer is so simple he's bored by it. "I don't know about you, but I'm sick of watching people die on a screen. Try something new."

Well. No one can argue with that. Not even Johanna.

More people talk. She closes her eyes, wonders if she can will herself to never open them again. She wants morphling. She wants to plunge into oblivion, to stop listening. Stop caring. She's probably due for another migraine soon anyway, though last time she'd sobbed and told them the pain was so bad she wanted to rip her eyeballs from their sockets the nurses had still refused to up the dose.

A moment passes, and she has to fight the urge to open her eyes to check if Haymitch's hands are shaking or if he's already shoved them deep into his pockets because he's finally gotten people to listen to him again, in spite of the yellowness of his skin and Plutarch oozing contempt beside him. Maybe it's because of that. She's never met anyone who actually seems to like Plutarch, which has either never bothered him or is something he's never been made aware of. Yet somehow she can't get away with the same kind of apathy without being deemed callous.

In the darkness, Snow's hair feels like hair. The shreds of his clothes feel like cloth. They could belong to anyone. They might as well be the closest she'll ever get to holding her mother or father or sister again.

"So we televise the trial," says Plutarch, some of his anger assuaged by the thought. "It's still destined to be divisive, and we don't know how it will end."

Gale's voice is quiet and surprisingly meek as he replies, "People like Katniss. They have sympathy for her. There isn't reason for that to have changed, even if they don't condone what she did."

Subtle, she sneers to herself. How stupid of her to think Katniss might not be forgiven, for once.

"It's like Johanna said," agrees Haymitch, and her eyes snap open, the room suddenly turned towards her. "Panem adored Prim, too. Her murder would always have led to an uprising. It still might. So let it unite them, give everyone an outlet for that grief and anger. Just show them what's different now."

Plutarch narrows his eyes at him, then says pointedly, "We were doing that before. You were just too deep in a bottle to notice."

Haymitch snorts. "You think I'm the only one? Where's your flair for the dramatic gone?"

Johanna looks around the room, eyes catching on Gale, on Beetee, on Haymitch, on the frown creasing itself on Peeta's face, and wonders who else knows this victory is based on a lie, and who actually cares. Does it really matter who was piloting the Capitol's hovercraft when one side's bombs started and prolonged a war and another side's ended it? She wants to say that at least Coin's Games would have been finite instead of an endless stretch of slaughter. She wants to argue that it might give them all closure, though she can imagine Haymitch's eyes on her and his dismissal with just one word: repetitive.

They're talking about leaders now, the word itching at her. She thinks it's less that she wants to be one and more that she simply wants to be asked. After all, a lot of people are stupid and have to be told what to do and what to think, and usually it results in cowardice instead of bravery. And she might have been stupid to think she had nothing to lose, that the Capitol couldn't find yet another way to chew her up and spit her out, but she'd had fury and purpose and instructions and she'd followed that, and she thinks that should have been enough. That it should, at the very least, mean more than it does.

"Based on my recollection, Coin appointed herself. Perhaps it's time for an election," says Haymitch. "That is what they do in a republic, isn't it?"

"We need a leader in the interim," insists one of the other rebels.

"Educating a population about genuine democracy would be months worth of programming, " interjects Plutarch, sounding rather put out. "Most people have only ever known Snow as a leader. They don't know what the word 'autocracy' means, let alone what living under a brand new political system will be like."

"Oh, shut up and get it over with," groans Johanna, because at this point they're just being pontificating, self-important fuckwits.

They keep going round in circles. For as much as Plutarch hates him, a grey cloudy-eyed drunk is one of the few people he actually listens to. He just prefers it when the ideas don't come directly from Haymitch's mouth. So Haymitch sits mute in the corner, except for when he slips in an occasional sentence here and there that manages to steer the conversation where he wants it, until eventually someone stumbles into the same thought he had and says it for him. Like a breeze rustling through a tree's leaves till its limbs shake till the very act of it swaying is taken for granted, at least until the whole thing blows over, trunk uprooted, and it finally lies quiet and decayed in the forest. Fuck, she wishes she was home.

Finally, Gale suggests they declare an emergency election and form a small commitee to vote on behalf of the districts, given most of them are represented as rebel leaders or intended witnesses to Snow's execution anyway.

"We can hold a proper election a few months out, once things have settled down," he adds.

What a nice idea. What a naive one. It's like when Caesar talked about her going home and enjoying her victory, when all Johanna found was a cold, concrete house and a persistent sleeplessness her old friends kept trying to insist was guilt.

Still, her eyes find the District 7 soldier, and there is something akin to trust there. Perhaps it's just recognition. Perhaps it's just a lack of any other decent options.

Plutarch begins assembling the list of representatives, hand-selected in the sense that it's made up of the few non-Capitol citizens whose names he actually knows. Two for each district, Volts is selected for District 3, and with a pang of guilt and irritation she can't help but think of Nuts. It's quickly overtaken by surprise when Johanna's name makes the cut for District 7, especially as Enobaria and Annie were left off the list entirely.

Naturally, the man stumbles when he gets to District 12.

"Gale and…Peeta," he decides quickly, lest anyone dare suggest Haymitch.

Haymitch says nothing, only lifting his eyebrows ever so slightly, and Plutarch exhales through his nose sharply, eventually gritting out, "Yes, fine, we need someone more impartial."

Which presumably means bread boy is out, but has the knock on effect of ruling out Katniss' mother and Gale's family too, and Johanna's fucked if she knows anyone else from District 12. Well, there's Delly. She wonders how she feels about all of this after she spent so much time defending Katniss to Peeta.

"Can I suggest -" starts Haymitch.

"No," Plutarch barks. "You've done enough."

Eventually, Plutarch snaps his fingers together, imminently pleased with himself. "Delly."

Haymitch smirks, and waits just long enough for it to become clear to the rest of the room that Plutarch doesn't know the the girl's last name, before he provides, "Cartwright."

Plutarch glowers at him, then turns to shove the list in Fulvia's direction. "We'll convene early tomorrow to officialise nominations, followed by the vote. Assuming everyone cooperates, we should have a new leader by tomorrow afternoon, effective immediately. Is there anything else that should be discussed?"

For a while, no one says nothing, and then Haymitch can't help himself.

"Nuclear disarmament and the redistribution of production ownership to the districts?"

Fulvia's pen hovers mid-air.

"Another time," is all Plutarch says, offering Haymitch a smile. Haymitch returns it with equal sarcasm.

She really should have believed Chaff when he said the pair once got into a fistfight over aqueducts, whatever the hell they are.

It's with trudging weariness, but slightly less trepidation, that people begin to get up and file out of the room. Good little soldiers accustomed to following orders without question.

Admittedly, the fact of it all doesn't hit her until she herself has stood up a moment later.

"Wait," says Johanna. "Does that mean I have to listen to a bunch of boring speeches?"

"Welcome to politics," replies Haymitch.

She must make a face. All she's done since she won the Games is bare the truth of herself, and all she's ever reaped from that is being disliked by almost everyone. Except Finnick, who appreciated hearing someone be blunt when he could never get close to such a thing, and maybe Haymitch, who's worn a facade for so long most people still forget to look past it, even when they know better.

So she makes a face because she's not happy, and Plutarch doesn't like it.

"Johanna. It occurs to me that seeing such a violent, unexpected assassination up close might have a detrimental effect on your condition," he says. His eyes flicker to the other victors. "On all of you, really. You've been through so much. But we have splendid care here in the Capitol. You're welcome to access it any time you, or someone else, think you need it. For as long as you need it."

It's a shock of electricity through her. She thinks she contorts, based on the smug, sly thing sliming its way across Plutarch's face, and Haymitch grabs her wrist without her realising she was moving it. Perhaps she wasn't, and he's just trying to drag her back down, away from the cold, grey concrete cells deep down below them. Away from the memory of being tortured for information about a plan that had already happened, for the names of people the Capitol already knew, and finally just because she was there, and they had no one else they could use against her. And afterwards, when they'd dried her down and draped the softest blanket around her and handed her a mug of hot cocoa she'd taken with shaking hands, they'd told her she'd done well. That she was brave. They'd even held her as she'd clung to them, wracked with sobs and convulsions and aftershocks. And then they'd done it all over again when they found out she still didn't have anything new to tell them.

She wonders if Plutarch thought of her once when she was down there because of him, because she wasn't Katniss. She wonders if he was the one who told the trainers in the Block to flood her out. She wonders how she could ever have believed she might really be free one day.

"One trial at a time, Plutarch," warns Haymitch. The Gamemaker has already walked out the door.

So. That's it. She's not stupid, she knows what will happen next. She'll vote tomorrow, and then she'll be sent home, and that will be it unless she steps out of line. No chance of getting on the execution squad now, even if she somehow stops being a lousy shot. She'll never be on television again. None of them will, but especially not her. She played her part, as pathetic and minor as it was, and now she'll be forgotten.

Katniss got to give the final word from the victors with the pluck of a bowstring, Finnick got a propo, and Johanna got censored the few times she was actually given screentime. All she gets is what's clutched in her hand, the meagre things from Snow she clawed and fought for that still aren't enough, and no one else even wants.

Left alone in the room, Haymitch lets go of her wrist and fists a hand in his curls. He turns to her, able to do little more than tentatively say her name, because asking if she's ok or telling her she's safe is fucking futile and they both know it.

"You're an idiot," she spits. Up close she can see just how exhausted he is, that he's sagging under the weight of it all. He wasn't coping before, none of them were, and all he's done now is take up another burden for a girl who doesn't give a shit about being alive anyway. Like Katniss hasn't been protected enough already, by him and Peeta and Cinna and Finnick and Gale and Johanna herself. There's a reason why Johanna's jealousy has never been unique. At least during the Quarter Quell Haymitch had the decency to seem a little resentful about it all himself.

"I know," he says.

"What the hell did you do it for?" she snarls. "Fuck you. You could have been something."

Because she thinks she believed in the revolution more when it was just a whisper among the victors, before it turned into one of Plutarch's propos and a war she didn't even get to fight in; because there was a reason why she'd listened to Haymitch when he told her to be allies with Katniss in the arena, even when it meant dragging Nuts and Volts along with her. And if he could do that, if he could get through to a series of furious, drug-addled victors and blow up an arena, then she knows he could work with rebel leaders and greedy politicians and whatever falls in between. Only now he never will, because no one knows why he'd jeopardise so many years of work for the sake of one girl and her dead sister, and they're not going to forgive him for it. Now he's doomed to go wherever his stupid mockingjay flies, which will probably be right into a window.

The revolution used to be about the future. She was sold justice and freedom and a meaningful death, and now she's not sure it's about anything other than Katniss and spiting Plutarch and having to somehow live with the fact that all their friends are dead.

Haymitch doesn't answer, mouth twisting bitter and skeptical. She shoves him, making him stumble back, the unsteadiness revealing some of his shakes. He really did hit the bottle hard. There's nothing else for him to hold onto, all his anger extinguished. Plutarch tried to kill him, the war nearly did, and now he'll probably drink himself to death during the trial.

"You stood up for her more than her alleged cousin did," she yells.

"Gale was advocating for leniency while you were trying to kick a corpse to death," Haymitch finally snaps. "He's just willing to appeal to bureaucracy, unlike you."

"I already knew he was an idiot, you don't need to convince me," she scoffs, because by now that boy should know the only thing collaboration gets anyone is a knife stuck in their back.

Haymitch opens his mouth, then decides she's not worth the effort and shuts it, so drained from all his bullshit with Plutarch he can hardly speak. Instead, he brushes her off with a wave of his hand, turning around and walking away. Leaving her alone again.

Johanna doesn't know what to do with herself. Carved up and split open all at once, she can barely move. It's not like when she had the flashback with all its terror and panic, though she might as well be sedated when everything is already such a nightmare. It's worse, because she knows exactly where she is, and that it's the last place she wants to be.

For how long she's rooted in the same spot, she doesn't know, though she can feel her feet and ankles start to ache with stiffness. Her fingers are sore from clutching so tight for so long. There's another kind of sting smarting at her as well, one that reminds her that she really had believed Katniss when she said she'd kill Snow. Whenever Johanna had sworn on her family's life, she meant it.

It's not until Haymitch comes back, because everyone from Snow to Plutarch knows it's surprisingly hard to get rid of him, that she moves. Suddenly motivated, she snatches the bottle he holds out towards her and greedily skulls it until he growls and physically wrestles her away, still clever and underhanded enough to go for the other prize clutched in her hand first. She'd rather be sober than drop even a strand of hair or a thread of fabric.

Triumphant in his theft, Haymitch finishes off the rest of the liquor. He glowers at her as he swishes the remainder around in his mouth before swallowing it, then tosses the empty bottle onto the floor, the clatter of it echoing around them.

"Where's Katniss?" she rasps, pretending the warmth in her mouth and throat is pleasant instead of yet another reminder of the feel of her body burning from the inside.

"Training Centre," he answers gruffly. Then, more lornful, "They won't let anyone talk to her. Couldn't even get a medic in."

Wow, she really has pissed them off. Johanna's almost impressed.

"You gonna tell me who to vote for tomorrow?" she asks, already dreading all the speeches and the production to come.

Haymitch snorts. "Like you need me to. You're overestimating how many people are going to volunteer for the position."

She supposes that two presidential deaths in one day might have rubbed the shine off it a bit. Knocked some of the power off it too, especially with Plutarch embedded in everything, finally ready to collect his reward. It seems like an utterly thankless role. Whoever wants it can have it, assuming they're are smart and lucid enough to string a few words together.

She would have voted for Seeder, and without being asked at that, which is the only kind of leadership she's ever vaguely respected. That was how they'd settled into their roles, unspoken. Seeder the leader, Haymitch the strategist, and Chaff the tactician. Gamemakers optional, until suddenly they weren't. And then there were the rest of them, younger and clumsier with inexperience but incensed and ready to fight - and, well, no one's ever dreamed up a rebellion without cannon fodder, have they? Not even the most idealistic of them.

A knock on the room's glossy table breaks her out of her head. Looking at Haymitch, a steely, decisive look in his eyes she hasn't seen for a while. Whatever he wore when he voted with Katniss was quieter, deeper and trickier, if not more resigned. So when he gestures for her to follow him, she does. He leads her through the mansion's long, imposing hallways, their footsteps silent on the thick carpets, still pristine despite the filth and desolation all around them, the whole country flooded with it.

By the time they arrive at a door, she has a pounding headache. It isn't until Haymitch opens it that she understands why, finally able to connect her pain to her senses, her body and brain rarely in sync anymore.

It's a greenhouse, filled with roses, the stench strong enough to make bile rise in her throat. She spits it out onto one of the plants, wishes the thing would recoil and wither at the touch and taste of her. Instead, she watches herself drip down from the petals onto the leaves and the stems, gleaming in the light, seeping back into the soil.

Her eyes pass over every row of flowers, each bursting bloom and browning, curling petal and unwinding bud. She expects to despise them, to want to rip them apart with her teeth and fingers the same way she ripped the hair and tore the clothing of their owner, but instead she just feels sorry for them. It's too hot and sticky in here, threatening to turn her own sweat against her. These frail things have never felt unfiltered sunlight or the howling wind around them; she can't imagine any of them in the districts, with their ridiculous, unnaturally dyed hues or perfectly acidic, regularly watered soil. They're caged, just like everything else Snow ever touched.

Johanna lands on the row of white roses, recalling the one Katniss was fiddling with, back when Coin was still alive. So, she got here first. This is all Haymitch can offer her then, a retread of the mockingjay's footsteps. Not Snow's body or the blood of his family, but something he cared about all the same, that he might not want to see destroyed.

She could take an axe to them. She could set them alight. Despite being a victor, she didn't know this room existed until now, which means most of the rebels don't, either. Only the ones who guarded him, or were trapped inside here like Haymitch and Katniss, tethered together even before Plutarch was daydreaming about trying them both for treason. At best, there might be plans to auction the roses off as souvenirs or hand them out as some symbol or reward for loyalty. Plutarch can't make her feel bad for sabotaging that. They're just plants.

Johanna doesn't move. She looks down at the strands of hair and cloth still in her hand and wishes that Snow was here and alive again, just so she'd know what to do. How to rip him apart and exactly where to start.

"Are the other victors coming?" she mumbles.

"Maybe. Depends on what you do," says Haymitch, settling himself onto a stool. "I thought you should get first go."

She wonders if she's regarded as the angriest victor, if she's lost the most, if anyone's still counting.

Right now, it feels like all her rage has deserted her, just like everything else. She's positive her stupid head doctor would tell her that's a good thing.

"I don't know what to do," she admits, the words nearly coming out as a laugh. Voting for killing kids came out easy, and she's not going to regret that or apologise for it. But this is stupid and petty enough that it just might make her feel worse. It might make her feel better, too.

Haymitch shrugs. "I'll stay until you do."

He's just biding his time until the trial. Until his stupid little game with Plutarch resumes or until he's back in District 12 or in front of a firing squad with Katniss. He's going to need to leave to get more liquor soon, anyway. She hopes he comes back with something stronger for her, too.

She wonders if Katniss' head doctor might be willing to treat other fucked up victors who enjoy daydreaming about assassination. Her one, that silver-eyed rabbit looking fucker she thought about slitting the throat of every time he reduced the dose of her painkillers, would tell her that, one day, both she and Haymitch will have to learn to step forward without anger being what propels them. That their rage will, eventually, kill them - as if they're not already on borrowed time, the poison long been in their bloodstreams.

Or not. Maybe she'll live a long, deliciously, gloriously angry life just to spite that quack. Maybe she'll find a way to be happy, or figure out the dose of morphling that turns her delusional enough to believe this was somehow all worth it. Maybe they're the same thing.

"Ok," says Johanna, and keeps her fist clenched.