𝐒𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐬 ☘︎ 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐇𝐚𝐰𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐞

𝐌𝐎𝐂𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐉𝐀𝐘 ☘︎ 13

I'm not dead. I come to as they lift me back into the hovercraft to go back to Thirteen. Why am I not dead?

Cinna... Cinna...

I can only think of how grateful I am towards him as I realise that he made my Mockingjay suit bulletproof. He must've.

When we get back, I get sent to the hospital. I hear people talking about my injuries. Bruised ribs and lung, apparently. But the bullet didn't even pierce my skin.

The first proper visitor I expect to get is my mother, Prim or Rory. But instead, I get a surprise one. Johanna Mason pulls back the curtain. She still lives in the hospital, so it mustn't've been hard for her to sneak over to my ward when no one was looking.

"There she is," she says sarcastically, making jazz hands. "The Mockingjay."

She sits herself down on my bed. "That speech you gave... I mean, oh man, feels. I still have goosebumps."

I roll my eyes but stay silent.

She disconnects the morphling IV tube that's feeding into my arm and puts it in the gap that's still in hers. "You don't mind, do you? They've cut off my supply of morphling. There's this head doctor that comes in and sees me every day, trying to help me adjust to reality," she sighs as the morphling enters her system, unscrewing the cap a bit more to get more in. "As if some guy from this rabbit's Warren actually knows anything about my reality," she looks straight at me, staring into my soul. "At least twenty times in the session he tells me I'm totally safe."

I scoff. This is a stupid thing to say, especially to a victor. "Safe from the Capitol, safe from Snow," Johanna goes on. "What about you, Mockingjay? You feeling totally safe?"

"Until I got shot," I answer.

"Oh please, the bullet didn't even touch you. Cinna saw to that, of course your costume would be bulletproof," she rolls her eyes. "So what are your injuries?"

"Bruised ribs, bruised lung," I answer weakly.

"Surprised they haven't found you a new lung," Johanna speaks meaningfully, but I can still tell she's taking the mick. "I mean, I've got two, you want one of mine? After all, it's everyone's job to keep you alive."

"Is that why you hate me?" I say bluntly.

"Partly," Johanna is just as blunt, perhaps more. "You're also a little hard to swallow. The whole tacky romance drama and the defender of the hopeless act, even though it's not an act, which makes it even more annoying. Feel free to take any of this personally."

"You should've been the Mockingjay, nobody'd have to tell you what to say," I weakly remark. "And even though you're a fucking nightmare, everyone listens to you."

"True. But you hit the nail on the head. Nobody likes me," Johanna leans forward.

"They're afraid of you," I point out.

"Maybe here, but... in the Capitol, you're all that they're scared of," she says.

She then picks up the picture of my father that I got from home. "It's just stuff I brought," I explain. She then gets to Austin's locket, which is open. Inside it there's the photos of my family and the Everdeens.

Then the pearl.

"This from Austin?"

"Yeah," I answer, my voice hollow.

She holds it in her hand, silently sobbing, tears running down her scarred face.

"They've made sure we've all been broken beyond repair, haven't they?"