The anchor of love||| Johanna Mason

the aftermath. interlude

When you win the games, you are celebrated, hailed a saviour, a queen even. 

Fitted with the very crown and everything. 

i got my crown. i loved my crown. Yet i hated them. hated the people who turned me into a monster, yet I also know it was me who created it, I turned myself into a monster for praise, which I got, all through my victory tour, all through the capitial.

yet not from the people I wanted it from, my family, if I can even call them that, seemed happy I was finally moving out, giving them more money, and leaving me again without anybody in my life.

at the victory ball I bailed after 3 hours of mi dress small talk, backed with my new friend, the much loved victor Finick Odair. we found a small bar and drank our sorrows away there, the next day my family was dead.

I didn't even care.

my district did, I was more of a proriah than I ever was before. yet I persevered, got a job at a local butchers, not as I needed the money more because I needed to keep my hands busy and visited finnick at every change I could. we trained together, both needing to keep our skills as deadly as possible for whatever future fear implanted in our minds.

our broken broken minds.

the little things broke me more, the colour yellow, the artificial light. not the feel of a weapon I'm my hands, i only felt control when that happened.

i fell into a pattern, training, working seeing finnick, and before I knew it years had passed by, I was as useless as James was as a mentor, yet much more dazzling. Never failing to get sponsors, never failing to do my best to bring them home, yet never successful, only a hope remained, until that hope died as well.

it wasn't until Johanna Mason and the 71st hunger games, 2 years after my own that I finally felt like me again.